For years, India’s gig and platform workers, the delivery riders, cab drivers and home-service providers who power app-based businesses, existed in a legal grey zone: neither fully employees nor genuinely independent contractors. That changed with the Code on Social Security, which came into force in November 2025 and was followed by detailed Central Rules notified in May 2026, formally recognizing gig and platform workers as a distinct category entitled to social security benefits for the first time in Indian labour law.
On paper, this is a milestone. In practice, the fine print has left many workers underwhelmed. Draft rules require gig workers to be engaged with an aggregator for at least 90 days in a financial year, rising to 120 days if they work across multiple platforms, before they qualify for benefits. Given how fluid and multi-platform gig work often is, critics argue these thresholds risk excluding a meaningful share of the workforce the law is meant to protect. On January 1, 2026, thousands of gig workers staged a nationwide strike partly in protest of these limitations.
Platform companies, for their part, have a reasonable case too. Aggregators argue that open-ended, unconditional benefit obligations could raise operating costs sharply and ultimately reduce the number of gig opportunities available, particularly for workers who use these platforms for supplementary or part-time income rather than a primary livelihood. Building a welfare architecture around a workforce that moves fluidly between apps, cities and full-time jobs is a genuinely hard design problem, not simply a matter of political will.
What the law gets right is recognition itself: gig workers are no longer invisible in India’s labour framework, and a funding mechanism for their welfare, drawing partly from aggregator contributions, now formally exists. What remains unresolved is whether the eligibility thresholds and implementation machinery will actually reach the workers who need protection most, particularly those juggling multiple apps or working seasonally. The next year of rule-making, not the headline announcement, will determine whether this reform delivers real security or just a new line in the labour code.