Akhil Surya

The 2020 guidelines were the first attempt to bring bike-driver platform workers into the rubric of the law. The revised guidelines treat safety, welfare, and social security as marginal obligations, only promoting the aggregators’ ease of doing business.

With its enactment, the Code on Social Security formalised the exploitative disguised employment relationship between digital platforms and platform workers. Despite Section 114 of the Code, which provided for framing “suitable welfare schemes”, and the e-Shram portal, the promise of social security for India’s platform workers remains unfulfilled.

India’s construction workers find themselves at the cross hairs between lack of any protection in law and worsening climate change. Some strong policy rethinking could improve, potentially save many lives.

By describing work as a “sacred and moral duty”, the policy seeks to introduce religious and scriptural conceptions to conceal and justify the extreme exploitation and deteriorating conditions of the working people.