Ayush Agrawal

This is a good oped in Sunday Times. India has already created 12 million gig jobs without a government jobs guarantee, giant factories or taxpayer-funded payrolls. That is something to build on not something to be ashamed of. And for many, platform work is not exploitation but a dignified escape from low-productivity, low-paying alternatives. Wage dynamics are revealing. A garment worker in a formal factory earns roughly ₹12,800 to ₹15,700 a month across Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Gujarat and Haryana. OTOH,a platform driver can gross around ₹27,000, or roughly ₹19,000 after operating costs while retaining something a conventional factory job cannot offer.+ flexibility and the ability to enter the labour market almost immediately. And the oped also points to the ideological contradiction of whose who have disdain only for 'gig jobs These are same folks who celebrate MNREGA as dignified employment somehow regard a person freely choosing to deliver food, drive a cab or take platform work as being “exploited”. MNREGA can pay as little as ₹252–₹336 a day in the states Yet the same people who defend guaranteed state-funded manual labour often want to regulate away flexible market-based work that workers themselves choose. Protect workers with accident insurance, portable social security and transparent algorithms. And fight mindset regulating an imperfect but rapidly expanding source of opportunity out of existence.