Indian Riders Choose New Year’s Eve Strike as Platforms Launch “10-minute delivery”

In response to the demands put forward by the striking riders, he said: “Just think: if a system is inherently unfair, how can it continuously attract people to join and treat it as a career choice?”

By “partners” he meant food delivery riders, showing that, in the employment relationship, riders are not regarded as the platform’s employees. This also meant that it was very easy for platforms to retaliate later against riders who had stopped work or struck — Indian labour law protects employees’ right to strike, so employers cannot dismiss or terminate their contracts for striking. But because riders do not have an employment contract, they do not enjoy such rights.

II. Workers’ Repeated Battles Against the Platform Economy

So, as a developing country with a population of 1.4 billion, what is India’s platform economy like?

Like most countries in the world, India has only in recent years seen a mushrooming of various platforms. Moreover, these platforms have also grown rapidly with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Take Zomato, one of the giants, for example. Founded in 2008, the platform was originally called FoodieBay, a restaurant review website. In 2010 it changed its name to Zomato, its current name, and continued to roll out review services around the world. By 2015, Zomato began testing food delivery services. At first it only cooperated with other food delivery platforms; it did not have its own delivery fleet until 2017. During the pandemic in 2020, Zomato seized the moment when Indian states announced social distancing to expand rapidly — on the one hand, it acquired Uber Eats‘ Indian business; on the other, it began operating daily grocery delivery. By this year, Zomato has become India’s largest food delivery platform, holding a 58% market share in restaurant food delivery.

Why was the pandemic such a boost to Zomato’s expansion? On the one hand, there was the demand for food delivery after people went into isolation; on the other, the pandemic hit the Indian economy hard, creating a large number of unemployed people. Western media interviewed many food delivery riders on India’s streets at the time of the New Year’s Eve strike, and many said they had previously been sole traders or small business owners, whose cash flow collapsed during the pandemic, leaving them unable to keep their small shops running and forcing them to become riders.

In India, the world’s most populous country, the strategy of food delivery giants has been to increase investment, cut unit prices, and seek a monopoly. India’s food delivery order prices are very low. Data shows that Zomato’s average delivery fee per order is about 12.5 Indian rupees, roughly one Chinese yuan. After subtracting the share paid to riders, the income from a single food delivery order cannot sustain a giant food delivery platform. So how do these companies keep operating? On the one hand, they rely on platform fees from the restaurant industry — restaurants using food delivery pay Zomato a 15% to 30% commission per order; on the other, they rely on continuous investment — people expect that once platforms such as Zomato achieve some form of monopoly across India’s huge market, they will be able to raise prices and rake in profits, and are therefore very willing to believe in Zomato’s future.

This strategy of exchanging low prices for market share is a kind of “growing pain” for platforms with massive funding, but for India’s small and medium-sized enterprises, let alone sole traders, life is not so easy. In 2024, a hot topic online in India was that the traditional husband-and-wife grocery stores were rapidly collapsing. In 2023 alone, more than 200,000 such shops closed down. At the same time, order volumes on food delivery/e-commerce platforms surged at a rate of more than 200% a year. At the time, some Indian media pointed out that the business characteristics of traditional Indian small shops were fast delivery and low prices. In the era of major platforms, when faced with platforms such as Zomato adopting “predatory pricing” at all costs to compete for the market, these characteristics could only result in complete defeat.

As a result, in India, e-commerce and food delivery platforms are driving an accelerating cycle — food delivery and delivery platforms keep rising, and to secure a monopoly in India’s huge market they keep driving down prices; price cuts cause a large number of small shops and small business owners to be unable to compete, turning them into unemployed workers; these people then find it hard to find or take up manual labour or office-based work, and many are absorbed by platforms, becoming food delivery riders who buy their own motorcycles and “partner” with the platforms.

In India, platformisation seems to be an unstoppable trend. It is estimated that in 2025 there were more than 10 million online platform workers in India. According to NITI Aayog’s forecast, by 2030 the number of gig economy workers in India will grow rapidly to around 24 million, most of whom will be platform workers.

Against such a backdrop of an “ample supply” of labour, the remark by the Zomato founder, “If a system is inherently unfair, how can it continuously attract people to work?”, is a textbook case of out-of-touch privilege. It is precisely because of such a buyer’s market that Indian food delivery riders face ever-greater delivery pressure and income pressure.

IV. Excessive Working Hours Endanger Road Safety

Media interviews show that riders in India’s major cities who work about 15 hours a day earn around 25,000 rupees a month (about 2,000 Chinese yuan), slightly higher than India’s average wage. But considering that riders must cover their own motorcycle costs and fuel, pay out of pocket for insurance, and bear the medical costs of accidents, this wage is not very attractive. The fact that so many people are willing to take this kind of work can only be explained by the fact that there are few alternatives in the market.

Safety and accidents are issues of concern to many Indian riders. This is closely related to platforms squeezing the delivery time for each order. Riders complain: the existing delivery targets have already made them repeatedly run red lights, break the rules, take risks, and rush themselves to exhaustion. “To complete orders on time, we have to speed up and speed up again. If we are not fast enough, we cannot deliver on time. Once I receive an order, all I can think is hurry, hurry, so that I can take on more orders.”

The striking Indian riders argued that the platforms’ new “10-minute delivery” proposal was aimed at competing for market share while disregarding riders’ safety. Once liability arises, they have no employment contract, and platforms merely treat them as “franchise contractors”. In a meeting between senator Raghav Chadha of the Indian Parliament and the riders, the riders said that they were very concerned about safety, especially about being injured or crashing under enormous delivery-time pressure and then having no protections afterwards.

Apart from safety and delivery-time issues, in this strike, Indian food delivery riders also demanded higher income per order — because the fuel prices they pay out of pocket are continuously rising due to fluctuations in international oil prices. They also demanded that companies’ complaint and account-blocking mechanisms be transparent — some false complaints can also lead to riders being banned, and appeals are 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) — called these mechanisms “algorithmic exploitation“.

V. Contract Workers or Sole Traders?

The gig economy is not a new phenomenon in India. Since independence, formal employment in India has consistently fallen far short of meeting demand. A large number of people can only seek income in various gig jobs. But unlike the earlier gig economy, the new platform gig economy exists and operates in the form of formal large companies, while also avoiding the regulation and many constraints that previously applied to formal large companies. Its workers also find it difficult to enjoy the greater flexibility that gig workers once had in family or community businesses, and they also have few opportunities to receive support from informal networks.

In India, several trade union organisations in the gig sector have appeared in recent years. The Telangana Gig and Platform Workers Union (TGPWU), which launched this riders’ action, and several other trade unions have previously organised protests by app-based domestic workers and ride-hailing drivers, highlighting overly poor treatment by platforms, and caste and identity discrimination.

In India, food delivery platforms have also tried to appease upper castes — in 2024, Zomato briefly launched a “vegetarian-only delivery” service. Riders believed this would lead to discrimination against caste and religious identity — people deemed “unclean” would be excluded from the dedicated delivery team. Under protest from trade unions and society, Zomato ultimately cancelled this service.

The very nature of platform work means that the gig economy is often regarded as difficult to organise into employee associations and trade unions. These associations in India respond to this reality by increasingly using social platforms to organise activities and connect workers, for example using short videos online to promote occupational safety awareness, income tax return filing, and social security registration. Meanwhile, they also secure offline “rest points” for riders, and use offline connection, collection, and feedback of issues as follow-up measures to online outreach.

A report published by TGPWU in 2025 shows that 62% of the gig workers surveyed said the trade union’s work had brought benefits to some extent, including providing a platform to voice demands, breaking the impasse in which individual workers could not engage the platform side in dialogue, and so on.

Many people have pointed out that, according to Indian legal precedents dating back more than half a century, gig workers should in fact be considered formal employees. A 1947 judgment by the Supreme Court of India pointed out that the biggest difference between an “independent contractor” and an employee is that the latter cannot decide the content and form of their work — they cannot decide for themselves which specific job to do or how to do that specific job. From this perspective, algorithms and platform apps in fact fit this definition. But on the issue of the internet platform economy, both the Indian government and the judiciary have in fact “turned a blind eye” to such precedents.

VI. Platforms Have Been Called In for a Talk

This action by Indian riders cannot be considered a complete “failure”. On the demand to cancel the “10-minute delivery” service, the riders achieved some results: on 13 January, Indian media reported that the Indian central government had called in several food delivery platforms for a talk, demanding that they stop making claims such as “delivered in 10 minutes”. However, the government seemed only to require platforms to stop advertising delivery-time guarantees, rather than completely cancel such services. This means that the food delivery riders’ victory remains limited.

In addition, as similar work stoppages have increased in recent years, and with the push by various associations of riders and gig workers, the Indian central government, while not intending to acknowledge riders as platforms’ “employees”, is also considering launching plans to bring gig workers under social security and regulation. Some local governments at the state (province) level have already enacted laws or are preparing to bring platform workers under legal protections.

Among these, Rajasthan state has already enacted laws, while several states including Karnataka have entered the legislative process. The common feature of these laws is that they all stipulate that platforms must set aside roughly 1% to 5% of per-order income to establish a protection fund for riders. In addition, most of the laws also stipulate that companies must provide riders with complete contracts and register them with the government. Although this is not an employment contract, the benefits are also meagre, and there are further practical issues in implementation, the approach is actually similar to recent legislative practices for managing the platform economy in Singapore and elsewhere — that is, treating platform labour as a status akin to employment, and requiring platform companies to bear part of the mandatory social insurance responsibility.

Foodthink author

A Qi

International news journalist, freelance writer

 

 

 

 

Editor: Tian Le