The report has been funded by the Indian arm of Prosus, the largest shareholder of food delivery platform Swiggy. Image for representation purpose only. File

A report released on Monday by the National Council for Applied Economic Research (NCAER) delivered detailed insights on the tenuous place in the urban economy of food delivery workers — overwhelmingly male, and often college-educated — for platforms like Zomato and Swiggy. Delivery agents’ real wages are shrinking as high fuel prices and inflation have eaten away at what little they are saving. And yet, the report says, these workers’ earnings are comparably better than the income of the average urban male worker.

The report has been funded by the Indian arm of Prosus, the largest shareholder of food delivery platform Swiggy. It is based on conversations with 924 food delivery workers across the country. Some inferences from the report align with the food delivery platform industry’s claims on contributing to jobs and local economies. 

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For instance, the report says delivery partners generally make more than they did in their previous jobs, or that starting deliveries got them out of a spell of unemployment; and the reason most delivery partners leave is the same reason they joined — a better paying opportunity elsewhere in the job market.

76% of delivery workers made their deliveries where they lived, suggesting those incomes are at least immediately staying within the local economy, the report says.

But the findings also paint a portrait of precarity among the workers — even though delivery workers make more than the average urban worker, they spend far more on fuel, which eats up over a third of what they make (averaged across Tier 1-3 cities). After fuel, their income is only about 5% higher than the urban average, with long-shift workers clocking around 11 hours a day doing an average of 15 deliveries. 

Delivery workers seldom stay — only 14.8% of current and former delivery agents had been making deliveries for more than two years when they were surveyed. Their high education levels (and market-pegged incomes) is well-aligned with the job scarcity in India for college graduates, but the social safety net is also scarce, with workers only insured against road accidents and little else. They generally have no health insurance or pension plans. 

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“Platform economy service providers or gig workers or ‘partners’ function on a day-to-day basis, but are formally treated as entrepreneurs by the platform management,” Shipra, a research scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University’s Centre for Informal Sector and Labour Studies (CISLS), and Minaketan Behera, Professor at the CISLS, wrote in The Economic and Political Weekly in 2020. 

This leads to “self-exploitation”, the scholars wrote, characterising the lack of social security and other employment benefits for regular workers as “an attempt to shift the risk of business [which] is normalised and glamourised by idealising entrepreneurial values in non-entrepreneurs”. 

Some States are responding to calls for enabling gig workers overall to get more social stability. The draft Rajasthan Platform-based Gig Workers (Registration and Welfare) Bill, for instance, envisions the creation of a welfare board in the State for gig workers. The National Coordination Committee on Gig Workers in July demanded that the Union Government create a model law for States that recognises them and widens their social safety net.