Published On: May 24, 2026
Authored By: Priyam Pratik
Faculty of Law, University of Allahabad
Abstract
Before dawn breaks, millions of Indians working as delivery partners load their bag, open an application on a battered smartphone, and in that single tap they become invisible to every labour statute that has governed Indian workers since Independence. They earn a living, pay taxes occasionally, and wear the platform’s branding — and yet, in the eyes of the law, they have never quite existed as a worker. This strange legal non-existence has been the defining condition of gig labour in India for the better part of a decade, marked by sporadic judicial observations and loud activist demands but with the matter still far from resolved. In the second half of 2025, however, a series of concrete legislative steps altered that picture.
This article examines and assesses those developments: what has actually changed, what the principal tensions and consequences of those changes are, and where this path is likely to lead.
Introduction
On 21 November 2025, the Central Government simultaneously enforced all four Labour Codes: the Code on Wages 2019,[1] the Industrial Relations Code 2020,[2] the Code on Social Security 2020 (‘SS Code’),[3] and the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020 (‘OSHWC Code’).[4] Together, they replaced twenty-nine central labour statutes that had accumulated over seven decades. For gig and platform workers, the more consequential moment arrived five weeks later. On 30 December 2025, the Ministry of Labour and Employment published draft Central Rules under all four Codes,[5] proposing for the very first time a mechanism through which gig workers could access social security benefits. Simultaneously, Karnataka introduced its Platform Based Gig Workers (Social Security and Welfare) Act 2025 (‘Karnataka Act’), which received the Governor’s assent on 11 September 2025,[6] making Karnataka the third Indian state after Rajasthan[7] and Bihar[8] to legislate specifically for this workforce.
Legal Developments: What Has Actually Changed?
Any account of the developments of 2025 must begin with what came before, because the gap between statutory text and legal reality has been the defining characteristic of gig worker regulation in India. The SS Code 2020, when Parliament passed it, included definitions of ‘gig worker’ and ‘platform worker’ and envisaged social security coverage for them. A ‘gig worker’ was defined as a person who performs work or participates in a work arrangement and earns from such activities outside of a traditional employer-employee relationship.[9] An ‘aggregator’ was defined as a digital intermediary connecting buyers and sellers of services.[10] These definitions were broad enough to capture Swiggy delivery partners, Ola drivers, Urban Company technicians, and freelance digital workers all at once. However, the SS Code was never operationalised. After receiving presidential assent, it sat idle for five years, waiting for subordinate rules that did not arrive.
States attempted to fill this vacuum. Rajasthan enacted its Platform Based Gig Workers (Registration and Welfare) Act in 2023,[11] establishing a Welfare Board and a contributory fund. Bihar followed with its own statute in 2025.[12] Karnataka, having attempted a Bill in 2024 that did not proceed, promulgated an Ordinance in May 2025[13] before converting it into the Karnataka Act through the legislative process. The result was a patchwork: meaningful in intent, but inconsistent across states and unanchored to central enforcement machinery.
The November–December 2025 shift introduced major changes. The draft Central Rules under the SS Code introduce a 90-day minimum association threshold: a gig or platform worker must have been associated with a single aggregator for at least 90 days in a financial year to qualify for centrally-created social security benefits.[14] Where a worker operates across multiple aggregators, the combined threshold rises to 120 days.[15] Aggregators must contribute between 1% and 2% of their annual turnover to a social security fund, subject to a ceiling of 5% of the total amount payable to gig workers in the relevant year.[16] The Karnataka Act supplements this framework with a welfare cess of 1–5% on every transaction processed through a platform, a Welfare Board with scheme-making powers, and a unique portable worker identity applicable across all aggregators operating in the state.[17]
Legal Analysis: Significance and Implications
The Unresolved Classification Problem
The central question in all of this legislation is one that courts across the world have grappled with for years: are gig workers employees, or are they independent contractors? The Indian legislative approach in 2025 is, in an important sense, a deliberate and principled sidestep. Both the SS Code and the Karnataka Act extend social security and welfare protections to gig workers without reclassifying them as employees. They construct a third regulatory category, something between employment and pure self-employment, for the purposes of statutory entitlements.
This approach is not without global parallel. The UK Supreme Court’s decision in Uber BV v Aslam[18] held that Uber drivers were ‘workers’ within the meaning of the Employment Rights Act 1996, a middle category between ’employee’ and ‘independent contractor’, and entitled them to minimum wage and paid leave. The Court emphasised that the degree of control Uber exercised over fares, routes, and working conditions was fundamentally incompatible with the characterisation of drivers as operating independent businesses. In India, the Karnataka High Court had, in proceedings involving Ola drivers, observed that where a platform controls fares, routes, and devices, the driver cannot meaningfully be treated as self-employed.[19]
PRS Legislative Research’s analysis of the Karnataka Bill noted a definitional tension that will likely matter in litigation: the definition of ‘gig work’ focuses primarily on the manner of obtaining work (through a platform, for a piece-rate) rather than the substantive features of the work relationship, degree of control, economic dependence, and integration into the platform’s productive process.[20] This means the definition could inadvertently classify as ‘gig workers’ some individuals who are, in substance, employees with a digital interface overlaid on a conventional employment relationship. Where that boundary falls will almost certainly be tested before the courts in the years ahead.
Practical Threshold or Structural Exclusion? The 90-Day Condition
The 90-day eligibility condition in the draft Central Rules has attracted pointed criticism, and that criticism is not without merit. Defenders of the threshold argue that a minimum association period is a reasonable administrative proxy for distinguishing workers who genuinely depend on gig income from those for whom platform work is truly occasional and supplementary. This is a sensible position in the abstract, and analogous minimum-period requirements exist in other statutory benefit frameworks.
The difficulty is that gig work is, by its nature, irregular. Workers move between platforms seasonally, take breaks during festivals, family emergencies, or health crises, and may not accumulate 90 days on any single aggregator in a year. The multi-aggregator threshold of 120 days compounds this problem: a worker splitting time between, say, Zomato and Blinkit might individually fall below 90 days on each platform yet, in aggregate, cross that threshold, but only if the regulatory infrastructure exists to track, verify, and aggregate that information across platforms. The draft Shram Shakti Niti 2025 envisions a Universal Social Security Account merging EPFO, ESIC, e-Shram, and PM-JAY into a single portable identity,[21] but that infrastructure does not yet exist and its implementation timeline remains uncertain.
Thresholds are administratively convenient but can systematically exclude the most precarious workers, precisely those the legislation nominally aims to protect. The flash strike by gig and platform workers on 31 December 2025, the day after the draft Rules were notified, was in part a response to exactly this concern.[22]
Algorithmic Accountability as Emerging Labour Law
The Karnataka Act also addresses what might be called algorithmic transparency. Aggregators are required to inform workers about work parameters, rating and categorisation systems, data use, and the manner in which automated monitoring and decision-making systems affect working conditions.[23] This provision deserves more attention than it has received. Algorithmic management, the use of automated systems to assign work, set prices, monitor performance, evaluate ratings, and in some cases terminate workers’ accounts, is one of the defining features of platform labour and one of its most contested dimensions. Gig workers routinely report being deactivated by platforms without explanation. The law has, until now, had almost nothing to say about this exercise of power. The Karnataka Act’s transparency obligations and its recognition of the right to refuse tasks represent a first attempt to bring algorithmic power within a framework of legal accountability. The International Labour Organisation’s 2021 report on platform work emphasised the inability of traditional employment law to address the diffuse, data-driven control that platforms exercise over their workforce.[24]
Centre-State Dynamics and Constitutional Architecture
The simultaneous operation of central Labour Codes and state-specific gig worker statutes raises questions that go to the constitutional structure of Indian labour regulation. Labour falls within the Concurrent List under Schedule VII of the Constitution of India 1950,[25] enabling both Parliament and state legislatures to legislate on it. Under Article 254, a state law that is repugnant to a central law on the same subject and which has not received presidential assent results in the central enactment prevailing. The Karnataka Act received the Governor’s assent and is not facially repugnant to the SS Code; the two can therefore coexist. But their interaction in practice will require careful navigation, particularly as the central Rules are finalised and their overlap with state welfare fund obligations becomes clearer.
DLA Piper’s analysis of the 2025 developments noted that the central rules and certain state-specific rules are not yet in simultaneous force, creating a transitional compliance environment of significant complexity.[26] The evidence suggests that Rajasthan’s 2023 model directly informed the Karnataka and Bihar approaches, an organic form of legislative learning. This does make the case for eventual harmonisation at the central level, and for a clearer articulation of the position where state and central rules conflict.
Conclusion and The Way Forward
The changes of the second half of 2025 were not a revolution in the condition of gig workers in India. Workers did not wake up on 22 November 2025 with employment contracts, EPF accounts, or paid leave entitlements. The four Labour Codes brought into force that day marked the beginning of a journey rather than its destination. The draft Rules of 30 December 2025 have not yet been finalised. The Karnataka Act has rules, but enforcement infrastructure is still being assembled. The 31 December 2025 flash strike by gig and platform workers in several cities, demanding higher pay and better working conditions, was a reminder that the workers themselves do not regard these developments as sufficient.[27]
And yet, the shift is structurally significant. For the first time, gig and platform workers are formally defined and formally included in central Indian labour legislation. The SS Code’s extension of provident fund, ESIC, gratuity, and maternity benefits to this workforce is now operative as a matter of statutory text. Once the Rules are finalised and the underlying digital infrastructure is built, it will represent a genuine expansion of the social floor for workers who have never before had one. The Karnataka Act’s algorithmic transparency provisions may serve as a template that other states, and eventually Parliament, adopt. The Shram Shakti Niti 2025’s vision of a Universal Social Security Account could, if implemented, address the multi-platform fragmentation that the 90-day threshold currently fails to resolve.
India’s 2025 legislative moment is, in that sense, a formal acknowledgment of a truth that the law had been reluctant to confront for the better part of a decade. Whether the framework assembled this year is durable enough to carry the weight of twenty-three million workers’ livelihoods is a question that the next few years of litigation, implementation, and political contestation will answer.
References
[1] Code on Wages 2019 (India).
[2] Industrial Relations Code 2020 (India).
[3] Code on Social Security 2020 (India) (‘SS Code’).
[4] Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020 (India) (‘OSHWC Code’).
[5] Ministry of Labour and Employment, Draft Central Rules under the Four Labour Codes (Gazette Notification, 30 December 2025).
[6] Karnataka Platform Based Gig Workers (Social Security and Welfare) Act 2025 (Governor’s assent 11 September 2025).
[7] Rajasthan Platform Based Gig Workers (Registration and Welfare) Act 2023.
[8] Bihar Gig and Platform Based Workers (Registration, Social Security and Welfare) Act 2025.
[9] SS Code 2020 (India) s 2(35).
[10] SS Code 2020 (India) s 2(1).
[11] Rajasthan Platform Based Gig Workers (Registration and Welfare) Act 2023 (India).
[12] Bihar Gig and Platform Based Workers (Registration, Social Security and Welfare) Act 2025 (India).
[13] Karnataka Platform Based Gig Workers (Social Security and Welfare) Ordinance 2025 (promulgated 27 May 2025).
[14] Draft Rules under SS Code 2020 (India).
[15] Ibid.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Karnataka Platform Based Gig Workers (Social Security and Welfare) Act 2025, ss 4-9.
[18] Uber BV v Aslam [2021] UKSC 5.
[19] Karnataka High Court – observations on the driver-platform relationship in Ola-related proceedings, cited in PRS Legislative Research, ‘The Draft Karnataka Platform Based Gig Workers (Social Security and Welfare) Bill, 2024’ (PRS India, 2024) accessed 11 April 2026.
[20] PRS Legislative Research, ‘The Karnataka Platform Based Gig Workers (Social Security and Welfare) Bill, 2025’ (PRS India, 2025) accessed 11 April 2026.
[21] Ministry of Labour and Employment, Shram Shakti Niti 2025 (Draft Policy Framework, 2025) – proposal for Universal Social Security Account integrating EPFO, ESIC, e-Shram, and PM-JAY.
[22] BW Legal World, ‘Explainer: How New Labour Code Rules Bring Gig Workers Into Social Security Net’ (BW Legal World, 2 January 2026) accessed 11 April 2026.
[23] Karnataka Platform Based Gig Workers (Social Security and Welfare) Act 2025, s 11.
[24] International Labour Organisation, World Employment and Social Outlook 2021: The Role of Digital Labour Platforms in Transforming the World of Work (ILO, 2021).
[25] Constitution of India 1950, Schedule VII, List III (Concurrent List), Entry 22 (labour and employment).
[26] DLA Piper GENIE, ‘New Labour Codes Usher in a New Era of Compliance’ (DLA Piper, February 2026) accessed 11 April 2026.
[27] Medianama, ‘Gig Workers Now Recognised Within India’s Labour Codes’ (Medianama, 24 November 2025) accessed 11 April 2026.
