Gig Work and Labour Market Informality in India: Evidence from the Periodic Labour Force Survey, 2017–2024

Imagine the world of work as a giant, bustling marketplace. For decades, economists have watched a specific corner of this market called the "informal economy." Think of this as the side of the street where people sell handmade crafts, do odd jobs for cash, or run small family stalls without official contracts, taxes, or safety nets. It's a massive part of life in many countries, including India, where millions of people have always worked this way. Recently, a new buzzword has exploded onto the scene: the "gig economy." This sounds like a high-tech revolution, where apps on smartphones connect workers to customers for quick tasks like delivering food or driving rides. The big question everyone is asking is: Is this new app-based work a magical, brand-new world that is totally different from the old, messy informal market? Or is it just the same old informal work, just wearing a shiny new digital costume?

This paper dives into that question using a massive amount of data from India. The researchers acted like detectives, sifting through seven years of official government surveys (from 2017 to 2024) that cover over one million workers. They wanted to see if the "gig" workers looked different from the "informal" workers in terms of who they are, where they live, and how their work has changed over time. If the gig economy were a true revolution, they expected to see a rapid explosion in numbers, a mix of highly educated and uneducated people, and a lot of women jumping in because the apps offered flexibility. Instead, they found something much more surprising: the "gig" workers in the data look almost exactly like the informal workers from the past. The study suggests that for the vast majority of people in India, the "gig economy" isn't a new transformation; it's just the old informal economy continuing under a new name, with the same patterns of who gets hired and who gets left behind.

The Big Detective Story: Is the Gig Economy a New World or an Old Ghost?

The authors of this paper started with a very exciting story that many people were telling. The story went like this: "Apps are changing everything! Millions of people are joining the gig economy, it's growing super fast, and it's helping women and young people find flexible work that didn't exist before." They called this the "platform-driven transformation."

To test if this story was true, the researchers looked at the "Periodic Labour Force Survey" (PLFS). Imagine this survey as a giant, national census that asks millions of people, "What are you doing for work right now?" The tricky part is that the survey doesn't have a specific checkbox that says "I am a gig worker" or "I work for an app." So, the researchers had to play detective. They built a "gig worker" definition by looking at other boxes people checked, like "self-employed," "casual labor," or "own-account worker." They reasoned that if you work for yourself without a boss, getting paid per task, you fit the structure of gig work, even if you aren't using an app.

They then ran a series of tests to see if the "gig" workers matched the "new world" story or the "old world" reality. Here is what they found:

1. The Growth Myth: Did the numbers explode?
The first thing everyone expected was a massive, steady climb in the number of gig workers as apps took over the country. The researchers thought, "If apps are expanding, the numbers should go up, up, up!"
But the data told a different tale. From 2017 to 2024, the percentage of workers in this "gig" category actually dropped from about 61% to 55%.
Now, you might think, "Maybe the apps only grew in the last year?" The researchers checked every single year. They found that while there were tiny bumps and dips (like a small spike in 2020 during the pandemic), there was no steady, massive growth. The "explosion" everyone talked about simply wasn't there in the national data. The numbers were actually shrinking slightly, not growing.

2. The Education Puzzle: Are smart people joining in?
The "new world" story suggested that the gig economy would be a U-shape. On one side, you'd have people with no education who couldn't find formal jobs. On the other side, you'd have highly educated people (like graduates) using apps for high-skill freelance work. The middle would be empty.
The data showed a straight line, not a U-shape. The more education a person had, the less likely they were to be in this "gig" category.

• People with no education were the most likely to be gig workers (about 32 percentage points more likely than graduates).
• People with a high school diploma were less likely.
• Graduates were the least likely.
  This suggests that for most people, gig work isn't a cool, high-tech choice for the educated; it's a fallback for those who can't find regular, formal jobs. The "high-skill platform freelancer" crowd is so small in the national data that it doesn't change the overall picture.

3. The Age Mystery: Is it a young person's game?
The story also claimed that gig work is a "starter job" for young people who will eventually move on to better, stable careers. You'd expect the numbers to be high for 20-year-olds and drop as people get older.
When the researchers looked at the raw numbers, they saw the opposite: older people were more likely to be gig workers. But when they controlled for other factors (like education and where people live), they found a different pattern: an "inverted-U." This means that if you hold everything else equal, the likelihood of gig work rises as you get older, peaks around age 54, and then drops.
This is the opposite of a "youth entry point." It looks more like a safety net that people fall back into as they get older and struggle to find stable formal work, rather than a cool first step for teenagers.

4. The Gender Gap: The Big Surprise
This is where the paper gets really interesting. The "new world" story suggested that apps would be great for women because they offer flexible hours to balance work and home. The researchers expected to see women joining the gig economy in huge numbers.
Instead, they found that women were 21.6 percentage points less likely than men to be classified as gig workers. That's a huge gap!
But then, they dug deeper. When they changed their definition to include "unpaid family helpers" (people working in a family business without a paycheck), the gap almost vanished, shrinking to less than 1 percentage point.
The authors suggest this isn't because women aren't working; it's because of how the government counts them. In India, women working in family businesses are often officially labeled as "unpaid helpers" rather than "self-employed workers." Since the researchers' "gig" definition didn't count the "unpaid helpers," the women disappeared from the stats. It turns out the "missing" women weren't missing at all; they were just labeled differently. This is a huge clue that the way we count work might be hiding the reality of what women are doing.

The Final Verdict: Same Old Work, New Name?

So, what is the big conclusion? The paper argues that the "gig economy" in India, as seen in this massive data set, is not a brand-new, high-tech revolution that is replacing the old ways of working. Instead, it looks like Platformised Informality.

Think of it like this: Imagine a street vendor selling mangoes. For years, they sold them from a cart. Then, someone puts a sticker on the cart that says "App-Ready" and gives them a smartphone. They are still selling mangoes from a cart, still dealing with the same customers, and still earning the same kind of unstable income. The "gig economy" in India looks like that sticker. It's the same informal work we've always had, just with a new label.

The researchers are very careful to say they didn't prove that no apps are changing things. They just found that in the big picture of one million workers, the "gig" workers look exactly like the "informal" workers from the past. They are less educated, more likely to be in rural areas, and the numbers aren't exploding. The "transformation" story is a bit of a myth when you look at the hard data.

The paper also highlights a major issue with how we count women's work. The fact that the gender gap disappears when you include "unpaid family helpers" suggests that official statistics might be undercounting the work women do, making it look like they aren't part of the economy when they actually are.

In short, the "gig economy" in India isn't a shiny new future that has arrived; it's mostly the familiar, informal past, just wearing a digital mask. The data suggests that until we see a real shift in who is working and how they are counted, the "gig" label is just a new name for an old reality.