When Platforms Launched ’10-Minute Delivery’, Indian Riders Chose to Strike on New Year’s Eve

On the strikers’ demands, he said: “Think about it — if the system itself were unfair, how could it possibly keep attracting people to join and make it a career choice?”

What he calls “partners” are in fact delivery riders, revealing that, in terms of labour relations, riders are not regarded as the platform’s employees. This in turn means that platforms find it easy to settle scores with riders who initiate walkouts or strikes — Indian labour law protects employees’ right to strike, so employers cannot dismiss or terminate them for doing so. But because riders have no employment contracts, they are not entitled to such protection.

II. Workers’ “Fight After Fight” Against the Platform Economy

So what is India’s platform economy like in a developing country of 1.4 billion people?

As in most of the world, various platforms in India have only sprung up like bamboo shoots after the spring rains in recent years, and they all expanded rapidly during the pandemic.

Take Zomato, one of the sector’s giants, as an example. The platform was founded in 2008 under the name FoodieBay — “the food lovers’ haven” — as a restaurant-review website. In 2010 it rebranded as Zomato and continued rolling out its review service globally. By 2015, Zomato began piloting food-delivery services, at first partnering with existing delivery platforms before building its own fleet in 2017. During the 2020 pandemic, Zomato seized the moment when Indian states announced lockdown restrictions to expand at full speed — on one front, it acquired the Indian operations of Uber Eats; on the other, it launched a daily-grocery-delivery service. By this year, Zomato has become India’s largest food-delivery platform, commanding a 58 per cent share of the restaurant-delivery market.

Why did the pandemic boost Zomato’s expansion so dramatically? On one hand, lockdowns created a surge in demand for home delivery; on the other, the pandemic hit the Indian economy hard, producing mass unemployment. Western media interviewed many delivery riders on the streets of Indian cities around the time of the New Year’s Eve strike, and a good number of them said they had once been self-employed shopkeepers or small business owners whose cash flow had collapsed during the pandemic, forcing them to close their modest stores and take up delivery work instead.

In India, the world’s most populous country, the giants’ strategy is clear: pour in more investment, undercut prices, and pursue monopoly. Delivery-order prices in India are remarkably low. Data shows that Zomato charges an average delivery fee of about 12.5 Indian rupees — roughly 10 pence. Once the rider’s share is deducted, a single delivery order simply cannot sustain a massive delivery platform. So how does the company keep operating? On one hand, by relying on commission fees from the restaurant sector — restaurants doing delivery business pay Zomato between 15 and 30 per cent per order; on the other, by relying on a continuous stream of investment — investors believe that once platforms like Zomato achieve a monopoly over India’s enormous market, they will simply raise prices and rake in the profits, so they are happy to believe in Zomato’s future.

For platforms sitting on vast pools of funding, this low-price-for-market-share strategy amounts to “growing pains”; but for India’s small and medium-sized enterprises and sole traders, the picture is far bleaker. In 2024, a hot topic across the Indian internet was the rapid collapse of the traditional family-run general store. In 2023 alone, more than 200,000 such shops shut their doors. Meanwhile, orders through delivery and e-commerce platforms were surging at over 200 per cent a year. At the time, several Indian media outlets pointed out that the hallmarks of India’s traditional corner shops had always been fast delivery and low prices. In the era of the big platforms, however, when they face the kind of cut-throat “predatory pricing” that platforms like Zomato deploy in the race for market share, they can only lose, and badly.

And so in India, online-shopping and food-delivery platforms are driving a cycle that accelerates with each turn — delivery and logistics platforms grow ever larger and continue to slash prices to wrest a monopoly over India’s vast market; price wars push legions of small shops and independent traders into the unemployment queue; these displaced workers struggle to find or sustain physical or office-based jobs, and many are absorbed by the platforms, becoming delivery riders who buy their own motorbikes and “partner” with the apps.

Platformisation in India now seems unstoppable. An estimated 10 million-plus Indians worked for online platforms in 2025, and NITI Aayog — India’s National Institution for Transforming India — projects that the country’s gig-economy workforce will surge to roughly 24 million by 2030, the vast majority of them platform workers.

Against such a backdrop of “abundant supply” of labour, the Zomato founder’s remark — “If the system itself were unfair, how could it possibly keep attracting people to work?” — is the quintessential “why don’t they eat meat congee?” — the ancient Chinese allusion for a ruler’s staggering ignorance of the people’s plight. It is precisely this buyer’s market that means India’s delivery riders face ever-growing pressure on both delivery speed and income.

IV. Excessive Working Hours Endanger Road Safety

Media interviews reveal that riders in India’s major cities, working roughly 15 hours a day, can earn around 25,000 rupees a month (approximately £210), slightly above the Indian average wage. But once one factors in that riders cover their own motorcycle costs, fuel, insurance and medical bills after accidents, such pay hardly looks attractive. That so many choose this work simply testifies to how few options exist in the wider job market.

Safety and accidents are issues that concern many Indian riders, closely tied to the platforms’ relentless compression of per-order delivery times. Riders complain that the existing targets already have them repeatedly running red lights, breaking traffic rules, taking risks, and racing themselves to exhaustion. “To finish on time, we have to speed up, and then speed up again. If we’re not fast enough, we can’t deliver on schedule. Once I accept an order, all I can think about is hurrying, hurrying, so that I can take on more orders.”

The riders who went on strike argued that the platforms’ new “delivery within ten minutes” promise puts market share ahead of rider safety, and that when liability arises, with no employment contracts to fall back on, the platforms simply treat them as “franchise contractors.” At a meeting between India’s upper house of Parliament member Raghav Chadha and a group of riders, they raised their deep concern for safety — especially injuries and crashes under intense time pressure, with no protections to turn to afterwards.

Beyond safety and delivery-time pressures, the riders also demanded higher per-order pay — the fuel prices they pay out of pocket continue to climb with fluctuations in global oil prices. They called for transparency in the platforms’ complaint and account-suspension processes: false complaints can get a rider’s account shut down, and appealing is extremely difficult. The two associations that organised the strike — the Indian Federation of App-Based Transport Workers (IFAT) and the Telangana Gig and Platform Workers’ Union (TGPWU) — dubbed these mechanisms “algorithmic exploitation.”

V. Contract Workers or Sole Traders?

The gig economy is nothing new in India. Since independence, the country’s formal job market has never come close to meeting demand, leaving vast numbers to seek income through all manner of odd jobs. But unlike the gig economy of the past, today’s platform-based gig economy operates through formal, large-scale corporations while sidestepping much of the regulation and many of the constraints that once applied to such firms. Practitioners can no longer enjoy the flexibility that gig workers once had in family-run or community businesses, nor can they count on support from informal networks as readily as before.

In recent years, several trade unions in India’s gig sector have emerged. The Telangana Gig and Platform Workers’ Union (TGPWU), which spearheaded this riders’ action, along with a handful of other unions, had previously led protests by app-based domestic workers and ride-hailing drivers, highlighting excessively low platform pay and caste- and identity-based discrimination.

Delivery platforms in India have even tried to court upper-caste consumers — in 2024, Zomato briefly launched a “vegetarian-only delivery” service. Riders warned it would breed discrimination based on caste and religious identity: those deemed “impure” would be excluded from the delivery pool. After protests from unions and civil society, Zomato ultimately withdrew the service.

The very nature of platform work means the gig economy is widely regarded as intractable to organise. Indian associations addressing this reality have turned primarily to social media to mobilise and connect workers — using short-form video, for instance, to raise awareness of occupational safety, income-tax filing, social-security registration and the like. At the same time, they lobby for offline “rest points” for riders and use in-person connection, issue collection and feedback as follow-up to their online outreach.

A 2025 report by the TGPWU shows that 62 per cent of surveyed gig workers said the unions’ work had brought benefits to a greater or lesser degree — providing a platform to voice grievances and breaking the impasse in which individual workers simply cannot engage with the platforms, among other gains.

Many have pointed out that, under legal precedents dating back half a century, platform gig workers could well qualify as formal employees. A 1947 Supreme Court ruling held that the key distinction between an “independent contractor” and an employee is that the latter has no say over the content or manner of their work — what specific tasks to perform and how to carry them out are not up to them. By this definition, algorithms and platform apps arguably meet the same criteria. Yet on the issue of the internet platform economy, the Indian government and the judiciary have, in effect, turned a blind eye to such precedents.

VI. Platforms Have Been Summoned

Nor can this year’s riders’ action be written off as a complete “failure.” On the demand to scrap the “delivery within ten minutes” service, the riders secured a measure of success: on 13 January, Indian media reported that the central government had summoned several delivery platforms and told them to stop advertising claims such as “delivered within ten minutes.” The government appears to have asked only that the platforms cease promoting speed claims, rather than ban the service outright — meaning the riders’ victory remains limited.

Moreover, with similar walkouts multiplying in recent years, and sustained advocacy by riders’ and platform workers’ associations, India’s central government — while not set to recognise riders as the platforms’ “employees” — is exploring plans to bring gig workers under social-security coverage and regulation. Several state governments have already legislated or are preparing to extend legal protections to platform workers.

Rajasthan has passed legislation, while several other states, including Karnataka, have entered the legislative process. The common thread in these laws is that they require platforms to set aside roughly 1 to 5 per cent of per-order revenue to establish a welfare fund for riders. Most also mandate that companies provide riders with full contracts and register them with the government. Although these are not employment contracts, the benefits are rather meagre, and implementation challenges remain, the underlying logic bears some resemblance to the platform-regulation legislation adopted in Singapore and elsewhere in recent years — treating platform labour as a quasi-employment relationship and requiring platform firms to shoulder a portion of compulsory social-insurance obligations.

Foodthink Contributor

A Qi

International news reporter, freelance writer

 

 

 

 

Editor: Tianle