On 12 June 2026, the International Labour Organization (ILO) adopted Convention No. 193, the first binding international labour standard designed specifically for platform and gig economy workers. The Convention raises questions that go well beyond labour rights. They concern the design, financing and administration of social security in labour markets where workers frequently move across multiple platforms, earnings fluctuate, and conventional employer-employee relationships are often absent.
India, along with several other countries, abstained from the vote despite already recognising platform workers within its legal framework. With a new global benchmark now in place, and given the scale and diversity of India’s platform economy, the challenge is no longer one of legal recognition but of institutional design. As India’s platform workforce is projected to grow from 7.7 million workers in 2020–21 to 23.5 million by 2029–30, the central question is whether the country can extend meaningful social security without creating a parallel welfare architecture that sits uneasily alongside existing labour market institutions.
Recognition Has Outpaced Protection
India’s Code on Social Security, 2020 formally recognises platform workers and requires aggregators to contribute between one and two percent of annual turnover towards a welfare fund. Rajasthan subsequently enacted a stronger state-level framework with enforceable obligations, and Karnataka has followed with a similar framework.
Yet legal recognition has not translated into effective protection. The rules required to operationalise the Code remain pending, registration remains limited, and independent assessments indicate that many platform workers continue to operate outside formal social security arrangements. Fairwork India’s 2024 ratings also suggest that most major platforms do not satisfy minimum earnings standards once fuel and vehicle costs are considered. These implementation gaps are significant, but they point to a deeper policy challenge than implementation alone.
The Institutional Challenge
Even if these implementation gaps were addressed tomorrow, a larger institutional question would remain. Designing social security for platform workers is considerably more difficult than recognising their need for it.
India’s existing social security architecture has evolved around contributory principles. Schemes such as the Employees’ Provident Fund and the Employees’ State Insurance Corporation rely on shared employer and employee contributions, relatively stable employment relationships, deferred benefits and financing arrangements that encourage long-term attachment to the labour market. These institutional features underpin both the financial sustainability of the system and the distribution of benefits over time.
Platform work challenges each of these assumptions. Workers frequently engage with multiple platforms simultaneously, enter and leave platform work according to changing circumstances, and experience earnings that vary significantly from month to month. Simply extending traditional contributory arrangements is unlikely to produce effective coverage unless their underlying financing and participation models are redesigned.
Creating an entirely separate welfare framework presents a different set of challenges. If salaried employees contribute directly towards their own social security while platform workers receive benefits financed primarily through platform levies or public resources, two groups performing economically valuable work would be covered by fundamentally different financing principles. Such an arrangement raises legitimate questions of equity, incentives and political sustainability that any durable reform must address.
The challenge, therefore, is not whether contributory principles should apply to platform work, but how they should evolve in labour markets characterised by multiple income sources, intermittent participation and digitally mediated work. This institutional question has received far less attention than the broader debate over extending worker protections, yet it is likely to determine whether future reforms prove workable in practice.
Protection Without Losing Flexibility
The platform economy has expanded employment opportunities for millions of workers, particularly those seeking flexible or supplementary sources of income. For many, the ability to determine working hours, combine multiple platforms, or temporarily leave and re-enter the labour market represents a significant advantage. Preserving that flexibility is therefore an important policy objective rather than an obstacle to reform.
Yet flexibility should not become a mechanism through which commercial risks are shifted almost entirely onto workers simply because work is organised through digital platforms. The policy challenge is therefore to reduce vulnerability without undermining the flexibility that distinguishes the platform economy from conventional employment.
Portability Is Only Part of the Answer
Much of the current policy discussion focuses on portability, but portability is only one component of a broader social security architecture. A common worker identifier linked to India’s digital public infrastructure could simplify registration across platforms and reduce administrative fragmentation. However, portability alone does not resolve more fundamental questions: what constitutes the contribution base, how entitlements accumulate when workers engage with multiple platforms, and how benefits are accessed when participation is intermittent rather than continuous.
The answers are unlikely to resemble conventional employment-based schemes. A delivery worker may earn income from three platforms in a single week and suspend platform work for several months thereafter. A framework designed around a single employer and uninterrupted employment is unlikely to accommodate such patterns without substantial adaptation.
Equally important is the nature of the benefits themselves. Social security cannot be defined simply by the existence of a welfare fund. It requires clearly specified entitlements, transparent eligibility conditions and accessible claims processes. Accident insurance, health protection and temporary income support during involuntary interruptions may all form part of such a framework, but their effectiveness will ultimately depend on institutional design and ease of access.
Reforms will also need to address questions that extend well beyond welfare contributions. The Code, for example, remains largely silent on algorithmic management, even though customer ratings and automated decision-making increasingly influence earnings, work allocation and account deactivation. Broader reforms will therefore need to encompass algorithmic transparency, effective grievance mechanisms, enforceable implementation, institutional responsibility for administering benefits, and financing arrangements that are regarded as equitable by workers, platforms, employers and the wider public. These questions are interconnected. Progress on one without attention to the others is unlikely to produce a durable settlement.
Beyond the Convention
The adoption of Convention No. 193 marks an important moment in the evolution of global labour standards, but it does not settle the debate over platform work. For India, the more significant questions are domestic rather than international.
The country has already accepted that platform workers form part of its labour market. The next stage is deciding how they fit within a social security system originally designed for a very different world of work. That requires more than extending benefits or creating new welfare funds. It requires reconsidering how contributory principles, employer responsibilities, worker participation and portability should evolve as employment relationships become more diverse.
In that sense, platform work is testing something much larger than the future of one segment of the labour market. It is testing whether India’s social security institutions can evolve beyond twentieth-century employment models while remaining financially sustainable, equitable and capable of supporting an increasingly diverse workforce.