Between Welfare and Control: Rethinking Social Protection Policies for Platform Workers in India

A significant number of existing research studies confirmed that digital platform capitalism bypasses the conventional or traditional labor law, allowing platform companies to operate and exploit the labour market. This exploitation of labour market for wealth accumulation through algorithmic control and surveillance, rating mechanisms, and lower piece rates thus produces a precarious work environment, impacting an enormous number of digitally mediated platform workers across the world. In India, emerging policy efforts to address this by extending social security to gig and app-based platform workers signal a significant shift in labour regulation. By recognising these workers as a distinct category, the state has initiated a new regulatory pathway that operates largely outside existing labour law frameworks. While this marks an important step toward institutional inclusion, it simultaneously relocates the question of labour protection into a new and still-evolving policy domain, where both digital labour platforms (DLPs) and workers are governed through fragmented and experimental regulatory mechanisms.

This paper examines the evolving landscape of social security policies for platform workers at both the central and state levels. Drawing on key legislations such as the Code on Social Security, 2020, and state-level enactments in Rajasthan (2023), Karnataka (2025), and Telangana (2025), the study analyses how social protection is conceptualised, structured, and operationalised. The findings suggest that while recent policy developments represent a positive institutional shift, they remain fragmented, uneven, and limited in scope. Social security provisions vary across states, with several jurisdictions yet to adopt comprehensive legislation, thereby constraining the scalability of welfare measures.

A critical concern lies in the financing architecture, which remains ambiguous at the central level and disproportionately reliant on worker contributions at the state level. In the absence of a clear minimum wage policy, such models risk reinforcing existing vulnerabilities rather than mitigating them. Although provisions for institutional flexibility such as the renegotiation of welfare fee contributions are embedded within these frameworks through representation of platform official, platform workers and government withing welfare boards, current arrangements appear inadequate for delivering comprehensive social protection, including pensions, maternity benefits, and long-term security comparable to formal employment.

The paper further highlights persistent gaps in power-sensitive inclusivity, particularly concerning migrant workers, part-time workers, and women, whose specific vulnerabilities remain insufficiently addressed. These limitations are compounded by the heterogeneous nature of platform work, which complicates the design of universal and portable welfare systems.

The study advances an integrated analytical framework combining the social policy approach of Gilbert and Terrell (2014) focusing on social allocation, delivery strategies, and financing with the SPIRIT framework (Luke et al., 2025), which emphasises Scalability, Inclusivity, Reflexivity, Institutional Flexibility, and Temporality. By doing so, it contributes to a deeper understanding of the gap between policy rhetoric and policy intend in the governance of platform labour, highlighting the challenges of building an inclusive and sustainable social protection regime in the digital economy which is transformative and complex.