The strike by delivery workers on December 31, and the forceful defence mounted soon after by Eternal CEO Deepinder Goyal, have turned the gig economy into a proxy battlefield for a larger ideological debate. Numbers have been marshalled, hourly earnings calculated, and the language of capitalism versus socialism dusted off with unusual confidence. What has been lost in the heat is a simple fact that modern economies do not work in absolutes, and neither do modern democracies.
Goyal’s public thread, framed as a data-driven rebuttal, laid out what delivery partners on Zomato and Blinkit earned in 2025. Average earnings per hour, he said, stood at Rs 102, up from Rs 92 the year before. On an illustrative basis, a partner working 10 hours a day for 26 days could gross around Rs 26,500 a month, or about Rs 21,000 after fuel and maintenance.
He emphasised that this metric was calculated on logged-in time, not just active deliveries, and argued that the data showed a steady upward trend. He also underlined that most partners worked intermittently, treating delivery as supplementary income rather than full-time employment.
How did critics respond to Deepinder’s tweet
Critics responded by questioning the assumptions embedded in those averages, pointing to long hours, income volatility, and the absence of social security. Supporters countered that the system was voluntary, legal, and offered flexibility unmatched by traditional employment. The debate quickly hardened into familiar camps: Exploitation versus opportunity, labour rights versus entrepreneurial freedom.
Such framing is misleading. The era of clean binaries in economic organisation is largely over. Contemporary labour markets operate in grey zones shaped by unequal bargaining power, technological mediation, and shifting definitions of employment. The Indian gig economy is legal, and it has undeniably expanded income opportunities for millions.
Legality of the gig economy framework
At the same time, legality does not automatically confer fairness, nor does innovation absolve systems of scrutiny. History offers a useful reminder of how uncomfortable these grey zones can be. When slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1833, plantation economies did not collapse overnight. They adapted.
One of the principal adaptations was the indentured labour system, a contract-based form of unfree labour that drew more than a million Indians to plantations across the Caribbean, Africa, and the Indian Ocean. On paper, indenture rested on consent—a fixed-term contract, wages, food, shelter, and the promise of return passage. In practice, recruitment was often deceptive, working conditions were brutal, and colonial laws criminalised absence and insubordination. Workers were not slaves, but their freedom was narrow and fragile.
Indenture sat in an uncomfortable space between slavery and free labour. It was not illegal, and it was defended in its time as a rational response to labour shortages. Yet it was also coercive, exploitative, and ultimately judged indefensible, leading to its abolition in 1917 after sustained political pressure. The point of recalling this history is not to equate today’s gig workers with indentured labourers. The differences matter. Gig workers are not legally tied to a single employer, they are not subject to criminal penalties for refusing work, and they can, in principle, log off or switch platforms.
But the structural echoes are hard to ignore. Both systems hinge on asymmetrical contracts where risk is shifted downwards and control is exercised without the formal recognition of employment. Under indenture, planters secured a predictable labour supply while workers bore the physical risks of disease, overwork, and climate. In the gig economy, platforms externalise costs by requiring workers to supply their own assets, absorb demand fluctuations, and manage income volatility, while algorithmic systems determine access to work in opaque ways. Control exists, but it is mediated through ratings, incentives, and de-platforming rather than overseers and penal codes.
Recognising these parallels does not require rejecting the gig economy outright. Unlike indenture, the contemporary policy response is not abolition but regulation. The government has already begun that process. The new labour codes have formally recognised gig and platform workers and created a framework for limited social security funded partly by aggregators. This is an acknowledgement that innovation in capital-labour relations rarely arrives fully formed. It evolves through contestation, improvisation, and, crucially, state intervention.
That is where Goyal’s defence falls short. There is nothing inherently wrong in presenting data or arguing that the gig model has expanded choice. But language matters, especially from those who sit on the stronger side of an unequal relationship. Describing a strike by delivery workers as the work of “miscreants” collapses legitimate grievances into lawlessness and shuts the door on dialogue.
The critics, too, err when they treat gig work as an unambiguous moral failure. For many workers, it remains a preferred option relative to informal alternatives that offer even less security and dignity. To deny that agency is as misleading as denying vulnerability.
Modern economies, like modern democracies, function through compromise rather than purity. The gig economy is neither the salvation of labour nor its undoing. It is a transitional form, shaped by technology and capital, and constrained, slowly, by law and politics. Progress will come not from absolutist defences or blanket condemnations, but from sober engagement: better data, clearer standards, and a willingness by platforms to accept that legality is a floor, not a moral ceiling.