According to a NITI Aayog recent report titled ‘India’s Booming Gig and Platform Economy’ https://countercurrents.org/2022/07/the-challenges-of-gig-economy/ India’s gig workforce, estimated to be at 77 lakh in 2020-21. It is expected to go up to 2.35 crore by 2029-30. Gig worker are defined by Niti Aayog as those engaged in livelihoods outside the traditional employer-employee arrangement. Gig workers can be broadly classified into platform and non-platform-based workers. Platform workers are those whose work is based on online software apps or digital platforms such as Ola and Uber. Non-platform gig workers are generally casual wage workers and own account workers in the conventional sectors, working part-time or full time. A gig economy is a free market system that provides short term contracts to independent workers.
The major potential problem is that gig workers are not in tune with the legal definition of employees. Every state has its own definition, but it mainly depends upon the degree of control that the company has over the worker. It is difficult for an individual worker to afford the cost of legal proceedings. This makes gig workers more vulnerable to settlement, even when they have a good legal claim.
The NITI Aayog report also emphasizes the corpus fund for any unclaimed economic situation which leads to job loss of the gig workers.A platform, in order to support auto-rickshaw, cab, and taxi drivers to mitigate the effects of the Covid-19 lockdown on their income, created a corpus of INR 20 Cr, called the “Drive the Driver Fund.” Measures such as offering a social security cover out of a corpus fund can help support gig workers and other self-employed individuals associated with the sector in case of contingencies.
by Ashish Singh
22/07/2022