Vandana Vasudevan: “We are close to becoming a nation of delivery workers”

The author of OTP Please! on blue collar gig work, the growing irrelevance of national boundaries in a tech-driven era, and barriers to collective bargaining

Your book is based partly on your research with Janpahal. What were your research questions? When, where and with whom did you conduct your fieldwork?

Author Vandana Vasudevan (Courtesy Jaipur Literature Festival)

To be more precise, it is not based on that survey with Janpahal but it is informed by it. I started working towards the book in June 2024, which means I began understanding the landscape of the gig economy and speaking to workers. This led me to their most vocal union leader Shaikh Salauddin, who

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The survey was called RIGHTS, which is an acronym for “Respect and Integrity of Gig workers; Humanity and Trust in Service” as it presents location-based platform workers’ perceptions and opinions of their jobs along the lines of Respect, Integrity, Humanity, and Trust. Our research questions were: Do platform workers feel they are respected by the company and by society for the job they do? Do platform workers believe the company is engaging with them with integrity and fairness with respect to compensation, penalties, and transparency of payment? Is the platform treating its workers with humanity, with attention to work conditions, hours of work per day, margin of error, etc? Is there a partnership of trust between the platform and the worker as reflected by conflict resolution, level of surveillance, and sharing of information?

The significance of this survey was that other surveys until then were sector specific or city specific or focussed mainly on certain factual aspects like income earned or hours worked. But no one had unpeeled the layers of gig work to understand the lived reality of the gig worker on a day-to-day basis. The questionnaire was administered face to face by Janpahal people in different cities. Doing this survey put me in touch with the workers and union leaders in different cities and so I got an insider’s view into their lives and challenges, some of which found their way into the book as well.

What made you expand the scope of your research beyond India? How did you end up interviewing respondents from Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka?

First, I only wanted to write about gig workers in India. Not even customers or sellers. Then as I wrote, I realized that workers don’t function in a vacuum. They exist because there is demand for doorstep delivery of food/groceries. I felt it was important to understand that angle. Who are these customers powering the online economy? What are their motivations for never stepping out of the house to buy stuff and ordering fried food at midnight? That’s how customers came in. And then it was imperative to add sellers, including small retailers on e-commerce platforms and restaurants selling on food delivery apps.

Coming to geography, as a development sector researcher I have done studies for international organizations that consider South Asia as a composite region. Therefore, I was familiar with taking that lens. Then out of curiosity I started reading up on what was happening in the digital economy in neighbouring countries and it was quite fascinating. Although the size of the market using apps is much smaller, of course, there was a lot of dynamism and innovation in this space.

Nepal, for instance, has many food delivery apps. Every few months there is a new one. Pakistan has an app that offers discounts across apps called GoLootLo. Bangladesh has an interesting app for women’s tailoring needs. For these two countries, I got interviews done through others and some I did on Zoom. I visited Sri Lanka and Nepal. Through local researchers and translators, I got some amazing stories from workers and consumers.

I am so glad I expanded the geography because what is happening near us is familiar and yet a little foreign, which makes it very interesting. I have been told by some readers that the best stories are those of the other countries. It is important to understand that technology is changing the way we buy, eat, work or travel for all human beings, so national boundaries are, in fact, irrelevant. It is a moment in time when all of humanity is profoundly impacted by technology.

Several industries employ gig workers. Which sectors did you choose to focus on, and why?

The International Labour Organization (ILO) classifies gig work into two categories. In situ gig workers are those who work from home as freelancers for online platforms like Upwork, doing graphic design, translation, etc. These are white collar jobs done on a laptop. The others, technically called “location-based gig workers”, are the visible ones on the road, moving from one customer location to the next. The main sectors in this category are parcel delivery (Amazon, Flipkart, Porter); food delivery (Swiggy, Zomato), quick commerce (Zepto, BlinkIt, Instamart) and transport (Uber, Rapido, Ola). My initial curiosity about the gig economy had been triggered by the scores of delivery workers gathering at the main gate of my building society during the Covid-19 pandemic. So, I began examining their lives.

As you analysed your data, what took you by surprise? How did the data challenge your assumptions?

I have done work studies on gender and transport in the past. My PhD thesis at the University of Grenoble was about the mobility of urban women. I have contributed to World Bank studies on this topic. So, I could tell you by heart what policy needs to do to make cities safer and more accessible for women. But talking to drivers for OTP Please! Online Buyers, Sellers and Gig Workers in South Asia showed me a totally different side to this. Many of the drivers feel unsafe when drunk women get into their cabs at night and misbehave or refuse to pay after the ride. There are horrible stories of girls demanding that the driver give all the cash he has if he doesn’t want to have a harassment case slapped on him! It is class playing out more than gender in these cases. There are many such counter intuitive examples in the book.

How are gig workers organizing themselves to demand better working conditions and pay?

In my book, each chapter is an emotion. There are nine emotions and one of them is Courage. It contains the stories of gig workers in different parts of the country forming groups to protest against what they see as unfair treatment and how their local leaders are helping them to organize themselves. The most interesting thing is that their most powerful tool is technology, including WhatsApp, Facebook and other apps. It is quite ironic that they are using tech to beat tech, as I have described in the book.

Shaikh Salauddin in Hyderabad has been at the forefront of these mobilizations as has Ashish Arora in Jaipur. I am in some of the WhatsApp groups of these workers and it is both heartbreaking and heartening to see some of their efforts. Some you know will die out in a whimper while others, like the protest on New Years’ Eve, which saw nearly two lakh workers join in, create a dent.

What are the barriers to unionizing and collective bargaining?

Gig workers live day to day, in fact order to order, working about 12-14 hours a day. It is hard for them to abandon their day’s work and join a protest. The platforms know that, so they dangle hard-to-resist incentives on the day of the strike. Workers are tempted to continue working rather than forego a day’s income to protest. Some workers in Jaipur told me that there have been cases of striking workers later barred from logging onto the platform,

A delivery worker on the job. (Sunil Ghosh / Hindustan Times)

In terms of labour laws, what steps are being taken by governments to support gig workers?

The 2025-2026 draft labour code rules in India aim to formalize protections for informal, gig, and platform workers through extension of Provident Fund (PF) and Employees’ State Insurance Corporation (ESIC) to gig/platform workers. A welfare fund fee of 1% to 2% of the transaction amount is collected from aggregators for a welfare board. The new labour codes state that gig and platform workers, like other informal workers, are entitled to minimum wage, journey allowance, health check ups etc. That’s great but it is not yet clear how this will be implemented, given that workers log onto multiple platforms simultaneously. Which platform will be responsible for extending these benefits? What is the minimum wage workers will get? Platform work is very different from other informal work like say a street vendor or construction labourer. There is a tech interface involved, which is useful because all kinds of data about the worker exists, but it is owned by the tech platform. As things stand, this platform is not obliged to share that data. These aspects need to be delved into by any agency implementing welfare measures for gig and platform workers.

Rajasthan was the first state to enact a gig workers’ welfare law in 2023. Then, in 2025, Karnataka passed the Karnataka Platform-Based Gig Workers (Social Security and Welfare) Act. It is a comprehensive law that covers creation of a tripartite board, social security, grievance redressal and algorithmic transparency. Jharkhand has passed an almost identical law. Telangana is next. Laws are a much-needed step but the devil is in the implementation.

It is not that all workers are unhappy. Many are grateful to have found this opportunity to earn a livelihood, especially those who lost their jobs during the pandemic. Platform work does pay above market wage rate for similar informal work. There are two issues though. Firstly, the balance of power in the equation is disproportionately tilted towards the platform and away from the worker. That needs to be corrected and hopefully the various laws proposed recently will help do that. Secondly, a gig by definition is a temporary thing. A permanent gig is an oxymoron, and many people are doing permanent gig work. That’s the part that is most worrying. We are dangerously close to becoming a nation of delivery workers. This, of course, is not the tech platform’s problem to solve.

How is your research being used by people advocating for gig workers’ rights?

Many reviewers and readers have praised the unwavering focus of the book on the human aspect of the digital economy, about which we only hear in terms of its scale, valuation and all the impressive tech. But the book lifts the veil and reminds us that the last mile of this digital dazzle is still carried out by human labour. It is the first book to bring those stories to light and workers feel seen when the book is showcased at different fora. However, for larger reach among workers, I am looking to get it published in vernacular languages, especially Hindi.

Chintan Girish Modi is a writer, journalist, educator, artist and literary critic. He has contributed to various anthologies including 101 Indian Children’s Books We Love (2013), Borderlines: Volume 1 (2015), Clear Hold Build (2019), Fearless Love (2019), and Bent Book (2020).