The balkanisation of gig work

WHEN STATES DESIGN THEIR OWN RULES IN ISOLATION, THEY CREATE UNEVEN PLAYING FIELDS

- RAGHAV PANDEY

THE ROAD TO regulatory hell is often paved with uncoordinated legislation. As India attempts to formalise the social security net for its burgeoning gig economy, we are witnessing a fracturing of the national market that threatens to undo the very welfare gains it seeks to achieve. The recent legislative manoeuvres by states like Jharkhand and Karnataka, while born of a noble intent to protect the precariat, have stumbled into a thicket of economic distortion. By deviating from the architectural blueprint of the Central Code on Social Security (CoSS), 2020, these state-level bills are engineering a constitutional absurdity.

The result is a balkanised regulatory regime that penalises domestic entrepreneurship and enfeebles the platforms relied upon to sustain gig livelihoods. This acts as a penalty on the digital model itself. It exposes a fundamental flaw in the current legislative trend: When states design their own rules in isolation, they create uneven playing fields that incentivise regulatory arbitrage rather than genuine welfare.

The Parliament passed CoSS in 2020 with a vision of a unified national architecture. A delivery partner’s livelihood does not adhere to the administrative boundaries of a district or a state. A student working in Ranchi today might move to a metro city like Delhi tomorrow, expecting their work history and accumulated benefits to travel with them.

State-specific legislation ignores this reality. By erecting silos of welfare, states are creating a scenario where a worker’s benefits are trapped in the jurisdiction where they were working. If Jharkhand has one set of rules and Karnataka another, does a worker migrating between the two lose their safety net? Do they have to register twice? The friction this introduces defeats the very purpose of the Central Code designed to offer a safety net as flexible and mobile as the workers it protects.