Swiggy gig workers listen to a briefing during a promotional event in Mumbai, India, October 14, 2024.
| Photo Credit: FRANCIS MASCARENHAS
The Union government, recognising the contribution of gig workers to the “new age services economy” in its 2025-26 Budget, announced healthcare coverage for gig workers who are registered on the e-Shram portal launched in 2021. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, who made the announcement in her Budget speech on February 1, 2025, said the measure is expected to benefit over one crore gig workers.Though the registration of gig workers has since gained momentum, the gap in numbers not only shows that a majority of such workers are yet to benefit from the announcement, but also points to inadequacies in measuring and understanding the rapidly growing size of the country’s gig workforce.While the Minister quoted the figure of one crore, the e-Shram portal has seen the registration of only 8.58 lakh gig workers as per a reply presented by the Ministry of Labour and Employment in the Rajya Sabha on January 29, 2026 — the latest date for which the data has been made publicly available. Even if one assumes the registrations to have doubled since January, it would account for only around 15% of the estimated number of gig workers.This means that five out of every six gig workers remain outside the government’s reach.The size of India’s gig workforce, often quoted to be over one crore in many of the government’s replies in Parliament last year, seems to emerge from a single source — the NITI Aayog’s ‘India’s Booming Gig and Platform Economy’ report released in June 2022. The report estimated the number of workers to be around 77 lakh in 2020-21. In the absence of dedicated efforts to measure the size of its gig workforce, India’s estimates have solely relied on this NITI Aayog report, which estimates the number of gig workers in 2024-25 and 2025-25 to be 1.27 crore and 1.43 crore respectively.By conceptualising the portal as an Aadhaar-seeded ‘National Database of Unorganised Workers (NDUW)’, and making registration a prerequisite for availing benefits, the government has made e-Shram the unified platform for tracking its unorganised workforce, including gig workers.The Periodic Labour Force Survey reports are yet to capture gig workers as a distinct category despite the estimated gig workforce accounting for about 2% of India’s total workforce of 61.6 crore, as cited by the 2025 PLFS report.The government officially defined who a gig worker is only in the Code on Social Security, 2020, which came into force last year. The Code promised more benefits, such as accident insurance, maternity benefits, and a dedicated social security fund, but most are yet to materialise.The promise of health coverage in the 2025-26 Budget seems to have however driven a surge in registrations. However, the registrations have not been uniform across States. Notably, highly urbanised Tamil Nadu (31,654), Telangana (29,951) and Keralam (11,219) are not even among the 10 States.NITI Aayog’s 2022 report listed 21 sectors that had gig workers. While this included agriculture, healthcare, education, and retail, the concentration of gig workers has been in the food industry, transportation, and domestic and household work, as per registrations on e-Shram. Published - September 03, 2026 01:11 pm IST
