Are gig employees part of Indias labour knowledge?

The 2025 Union Budget took a number of measures to formally ‘recognise’ gig and platform employees, and prolonged numerous social safety schemes to this rising workforce. Despite this recognition, the revised Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), 2025 doesn’t embrace substantive modifications to account for the varied types of gig and platform work.

Gaps in labour classification

Gig employees had been first integrated into the authorized framework by the Code on Social Security, 2020. Under Chapter I, Section 2(35), a gig employee is outlined as “an individual who participates in a piece association and earns from such actions exterior of a conventional employer-employee relationship.” Platform work, as outlined within the Code, is “a piece association exterior of a conventional employer-employee relationship by which organisations or people use a web based platform to entry different organisations or people to resolve particular issues or to supply particular providers or any such different actions which can be notified by the Central Government, in change for fee.”

While this definition separates gig employees from each formal and casual classes, it doesn’t clearly outline who a gig employee is or the character of gig work. According to NITI Aayog’s 2022 report ‘India’s Booming Gig and Platform Economy,’ the gig workforce is predicted to achieve 23.5 million by 2029-30. Despite such projections and efforts to outline gig work, India’s major labour statistics supply, the PLFS, continues to subsume gig work underneath obscure classes comparable to ‘self-employed’, ‘own-account employees’, or ‘informal labour’. This statistical invisibility has direct penalties.

Clause 141 of the Code on Social Security, 2020, “seeks to supply that the Central Government shall set up a Social Security Fund for social safety and welfare of the unorganised employees, gig employees and platform employees.” Similarly, the National Social Security Board, constituted underneath Section 6 of the Code on Social Security, 2020, is tasked with framing and overseeing welfare schemes for gig and platform employees. Such welfare boards and policymakers depend on the PLFS for ‘evidence-based coverage,’ however the absence of a definite class for gig and platform employees undermines its very intent. When classification itself is unclear in major datasets, entry to schemes turns into uneven and exclusionary.

How the PLFS falls brief

In response to a Rajya Sabha question on whether or not the federal government had up to date PLFS methodology to seize the rise of gig work, the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation acknowledged, “No updation within the PLFS Schedule has been undertaken with the target of particularly figuring out individuals engaged within the gig financial system. However, all market actions i.e. actions carried out for pay or revenue which lead to manufacturing of products and providers for change are included underneath the area of financial exercise thought-about in PLFS. The exercise scenario of an individual who’s discovered to be working or being engaged in financial exercise throughout a specified reference interval is related to employment in PLFS. Hence, even the individuals engaged in ‘gig financial system’ for pay & revenue are lined in PLFS.”

Though gig work is technically included underneath financial exercise, with out a particular class or classification, the survey fails to supply visibility into the distinctive nature of digital labour, characterised by a number of job roles, dependence on algorithms, lack of formal contract and absence of security metrics. In the survey, whereas the query on the kind of job contract supplies an possibility for ‘no written job contract’, it doesn’t seize the hybrid nature of labor.

Unlike conventional self-employment, gig work is formed by platform algorithms, carried out throughout a number of apps and are principally task-based relatively than time-bound. Workers haven’t any steady contracts, and infrequently depend on digital attain. Many lack entry to advantages or protections obtainable to formal employees, and don’t absolutely personal their work processes, making the “self-employed” label deceptive. Employment uncertainties, earnings volatility and algorithm governance stay invisible inside PLFS classification. A meals supply individual working throughout platforms like Swiggy, Zomato, as an illustration, can be flattened right into a class that doesn’t mirror solely on their employment circumstances or social safety wants.

Recognition with out illustration

Recent coverage efforts just like the e-Shram registration, the issuance of digital ID playing cards, and well being protection underneath the Ayushman Bharat Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana point out the state’s recognition of the gig and platform workforce. But except statistical techniques just like the PLFS evolve, the info meant to help and monitor these interventions can’t be thought-about inclusive.

The 2025 PLFS revision launched some necessary updates: a bigger pattern dimension, month-to-month estimates, and higher rural illustration. However, it nonetheless doesn’t tackle the problems of how gig work is outlined and understood. For inclusive coverage making, India should replace PLFS classification codes or introduce survey modules that distinctly seize gig work.

Durga Narayan is a coverage researcher affiliated with the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS) and the Observer Research Foundation (ORF), Mumbai.