On October 25, 2025, 24-year-old food-delivery rider Darshan was chased and killed in Bengaluru after his scooter brushed against a car’s wing mirror during a delivery run. What the police first logged as a routine accident turned into a case of murder once CCTV footage surfaced. The incident shocked the public for a moment. Yet it reflected a daily reality for millions of gig workers who navigate India’s cities without insurance, without recourse, and without the most basic protections of a modern labour market. This is the backdrop against which the government claims that the new labour codes will extend social protection and minimum-wage guarantees to gig and platform workers. The rhetoric is uplifting; the reality far less so.
The Social Security Code is presented as a watershed moment, promising insurance, maternity benefits, and old-age support for gig workers. It even establishes a dedicated social security fund. But a promise without a fiscal backbone is not a promise at all. The Code does not specify who will contribute how much to this fund, nor does it mandate consistent financial participation by the Centre or the states. A fund that depends on discretionary contributions cannot form the basis of a rights-based social protection regime.
When the law creates a category of beneficiaries but fails to identify clear duty-bearers, it merely shifts workers from one undefined space to another. The result is a legal structure that appears transformative but remains unfunded, unmoored, and unenforceable.
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Minimum wages for gig workers
The situation is no better when it comes to minimum wages. The Code on Wages proclaims that all workers, including gig workers, are entitled to a statutory floor wage. But a right that cannot be operationalised is an illusion. Gig work is task-based, governed not by fixed hours but by demand patterns and algorithmic dispatches. A delivery rider may wait 20 minutes between orders; a ride-share driver may remain logged in but receive no bookings.
If minimum wages apply, do platforms guarantee earnings per hour, per kilometre, or per day? The Code offers no definition, no methodology, and no formula. In law, a right becomes real only when the mechanism for enforcing it is unambiguous. Here, the mechanism is absent. What remains is a gesture toward protection, not protection itself.
Labour reforms without employer accountability
The heart of the problem lies in the refusal to define platforms as employers. Instead of relying on long-established labour jurisprudence — where the employer is the entity that exercises control — the Codes invent new categories such as gig workers, platform workers, and aggregators. These categories neatly separate the act of labour from the entity that extracts value from it. By avoiding the word employer, the Codes sidestep the obligations that employers traditionally bear: contributions, safety nets, accountability, and liability.
The Union government drafts broad policy blueprints; the states are left to frame and enforce rules; and the platforms insist they are mere intermediaries. In this triangle, responsibility is distributed so widely that it eventually belongs to no one. Protection becomes optional; vulnerability becomes permanent.
The concurrent nature of labour law compounds the challenge. The Centre has enacted the Codes, but states must implement them through rules, boards, and digital infrastructure. The outcomes are already diverging. One state may set up a functioning welfare board; another may delay rule-making indefinitely; a third may lack the administrative bandwidth to enforce anything beyond basic registration.
Gig workers move across jurisdictions daily: a driver may operate in Delhi in the morning, Noida in the afternoon, and Gurugram at night. Yet their social protection, if it materialises at all, will be tied to a single state’s administrative machinery. The Codes do not address portability of benefits, harmonisation of rules, or real-time data-sharing—requirements that are essential for a mobile workforce. A constitutional right to equal protection means little if the safety net depends on the traffic signal under which a worker happens to stand that day.
Enforcement challenges for gig worker rights
The greatest weakness, however, lies in enforcement. Even in the formal sector, labour inspection has struggled to keep pace with modern workplaces. To expect states to audit cloud-based platforms, decode algorithmic wage assignments, identify unfair deactivations, or verify under-reporting of commissions is to expect the impossible. Inspectors trained to check physical registers are now expected to evaluate dynamic, opaque algorithmic systems that even data scientists struggle to interpret.
Enforcement in the gig economy requires access to platform data, specialised technical capacity, and the authority to demand algorithmic transparency. None of these exist today. As a result, the Codes create obligations in theory and exemptions in practice. Rights that cannot be enforced cease to be rights at all; they become footnotes in legislation.
A credible future for labour reforms
The political messaging around the labour codes is more sophisticated than their legal design. The government describes the Codes as historic reforms, and at a headline level, the claim is difficult to resist. They unify multiple laws, modernise terminology, and gesture toward inclusivity. But beneath the surface lies a notable hesitation to impose concrete obligations on platforms—one of the fastest-growing sectors in India’s urban economy.
By leaving crucial details undefined, shifting implementation to overstretched states, and avoiding clear employer classification, the Codes achieve the optics of reform without altering the balance of power between platforms and workers. One is tempted to ask: Are we building a safety net for workers, or a comfort zone for aggregators?
India’s gig workers deserve more than rhetorical reassurance. A credible framework must begin with a clear recognition that platform labour is not entrepreneurial independence but dependent work governed by unilateral terms. Many countries have introduced intermediate classifications such as dependent contractors, triggering obligations even without full employee status.
India needs a similar statutory test that reflects actual working conditions, not the legal fiction of “partners.” Once this classification is in place, contributions to a social insurance fund must be made mandatory, predictable, and proportionate to platform revenues. Welfare cannot depend on the generosity of platforms or the discretion of governments; it must flow from statutory obligations.
Finally, enforcement must be re-imagined. Digital audits, algorithmic oversight, and interstate portability require a central regulatory authority with the technical capacity to work alongside state boards. This is not unprecedented: India has built centralised institutions for GST, insolvency resolution, and financial regulation. Gig work, which now supports millions of livelihoods, deserves similar institutional seriousness.
The death of Darshan N is not an aberration; it is a reminder of the risks gig workers face every day—risks that the current legal framework neither acknowledges adequately nor mitigates effectively. The new labour codes promise transformation, but promises alone cannot substitute for architecture.
Until India builds a coherent, enforceable, and adequately funded system of social protection, gig workers will remain trapped between the rhetoric of reform and the reality of precarity. The platform economy is here to stay; the question is whether the law will stand with the workers who sustain it.