PLUG-In · Platform Labour and Urban Gig Work: Insights from India

PLUG-In is a pioneering study of state-supported platform innovations in India that are worker- and local-economy centred, scalable, and effective in challenging monopolistic platforms, with the broader aim of fostering meaningful 'South-North’ knowledge exchange, particularly with European stakeholders. Digital on-demand labour platforms increasingly shape everyday lives worldwide, raising challenges around the regulation of monopolistic actors, the precarious labour relations they engender, and the threats posed to local economies. State-led interventions have often sought to strengthen workers’ bargaining power by extending employment rights, yet recent scholarship highlights that umbrella legislation alone cannot address gig workers’ structural precarity, as dominant platforms continuously exploit regulatory loopholes. Against this backdrop, PLUG-In pursues three interlinked objectives: 1) to develop a platform research agenda attentive to heterogeneous strategies for improving working conditions and reinforcing local economies; 2) to empirically examine the lived experiences of workers and sellers engaged in platform alternatives; 3) to foster South-North innovation exchange. It does so through an in-depth study of two Indian platforms hosted on the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), a state-funded, digital public infrastructure: Namma Yatri, a ride-hail platform co-conceived with a drivers’ union with 600,000+ drivers, and KiranaPro, a retail platform (operating in 35+ Indian cities) that supports local enterprises increasingly threatened by e-commerce oligopolies. Through qualitative fieldwork with workers, sellers, and key informants, PLUG-In seeks to distil lessons and enable knowledge and innovation exchange to address urgent societal challenges, including in the EU: promoting decent work and social rights in the platform economy, strengthening local and regional innovation ecosystems, and safeguarding micro-enterprises central to urban economies.