Introduction

Over the New Year of 2026, tens of thousands of delivery workers went on strike across Indian cities, protesting unsafe delivery targets and arbitrary algorithmic control over their delivery time frames. The Union Labour Ministry pressed Blinkit, Zepto and Swiggy Instamart (Quick Commerce Apps) to drop the “10-minute delivery” branding. . India’s Constitution divides law-making power between the Union (the central government) and the States. Labour and social security fall under the Concurrent List, so both the Union and the States may legislate on the subject. In November 2025, the Code on Social Security, 2020 was brought into force. While it was a Union law, it still left States free to enact their own measures alongside it, so long as they remain consistent with it. It for the first time defines “gig” and “platform” workers in central law and requires platforms that engage them to fund their welfare. That obligation is a contribution of one to two per cent of annual turnover to a Social Security Fund meant to finance welfare schemes for these workers, and is the only obligation the Code makes binding on such  platforms. This piece argues that read against the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), the Code substitutes this payment for the substance of the platforms’ responsibility to respect. Where the UNGPs require a business to identify and prevent the adverse impacts it causes, the Code requires it to help pay for those impacts after they occur. Moreover, the strike was partly about riders dying on the road as they rushed to hit the speeds their platforms reward, but neither act touches the source of that harm i.e. the order-assignment and penalty systems the platforms design and control.

Two Architectures, One Binding Obligation

The UNGPs rest on three pillars: the State’s duty to protect human rights (Pillar I), the company’s responsibility to respect them (Pillar II), and access to a remedy (Pillar III). A business meets Pillar II through a policy commitment, human rights due diligence (the process by which it identifies, prevents, mitigates and accounts for the harms it causes) and remediation of harms that occur anyway. Now whether due diligence becomes binding depends on what the State has built, and hence becomes a Pillar I function. What follows is therefore a critique of how the State has legislated, and of what that legislation does to the platforms’ responsibility to respect. India has enacted no statute requiring due diligence. The “respect” pillar rather runs through a voluntary instrument called National Guidelines on Responsible Business Conduct (NGRBC), whose Principle 3 asks businesses to “respect and promote the well-being of all employees, including those in their value chains,” and whose Principle 5 covers human rights. Under SEBI’s reporting framework, the top 1,000 listed companies must disclose how they perform against these principles, but nothing indicates that they must actually follow them. India’s National Action Plan on Business and Human Rights (the policy document by which a State sets out how it will implement the UNGPs), promised by 2020, still remains a “Zero Draft” that was never finalised. The State, in discharging its duty to protect, has thus built an architecture in which the responsibility to respect never hardens into a duty of due diligence, but ends at a levy.

The Responsibility for the Harm

The Code on Social Security, defines gig and platform workers as persons in a work arrangement outside the traditional employer-employee relationship, not as employees. This makes it seem like the text in India’s soft architecture that speaks best to their treatment is the NGRBC’s value-chain clause. However, how much a business must do about a harm depends, under the UNGPs, on its involvement in it. They differentiate amongst impacts a business causes, impacts it contributes to, and impacts its operations are merely linked to, and calibrate the required response accordingly. The harm, as argued below, is not something the platform is merely linked to through its value chain, it is one the platform at the very least contributes to, and arguably causes.

For quick-commerce platforms, the business runs on speed, which is deadly on India’s roads. The unions that led the strike alleged that the “10 minutes delivery” model pushes riders into life-endangering traffic offences. The platforms reply that riders are not formally timed, rather the speed comes from the closeness of their “dark stores” (micro-warehouses in the neighbourhoods). While no rider is ordered to speed, delay still brings lower ratings, penalties and fewer orders, so the system rewards the fastest rider over the careful one. And because riders are not employees, their road deaths are not even recorded as workplace fatalities.

What the Levy Actually Pays For

It must be conceded that the welfare measures that the Code contemplates for platform workers, like life and disability cover, accident insurance, health and maternity benefits, old age protection, etc, is broad for a first statute, and this piece does not dispute any of it. However, the trouble is also in how the payment works. The levy is calculated on turnover, with no connection to safety. So a platform that makes its work safer pays the same amount as one that makes it more dangerous. Insurance premiums, by contrast, rise when harm rises, which is why even a system built purely around compensation usually gives the payer some reason to reduce the harm. A turnover levy gives the platform no such incentive.

There is also the question of how this levy works. It goes to a Social Security Fund held by the central government, and money leaves it only through welfare schemes, which Section 114 says the government “may frame.” Six years after the Code was passed, and with the final rules notified in May 2026, no scheme has been notified under it. The one benefit gig workers have actually been promised, Ayushman Bharat health cover (hospital treatment cover of up to ₹5 lakh a year per family) in the 2025 Budget, has not been launched for platform workers yet.  Even when schemes under the Code do arrive, a rider will qualify only after ninety days with one aggregator, or 120 across several, in the previous financial year. One platform’s own data puts its average delivery worker at thirty-eight working days a year, meaning that most riders will simply never qualify.

A Better Architecture?

Nothing in the Code requires platforms to disclose or negotiate over the algorithms that assign orders, set rates or impose penalties. India’s own federal structure, Karnataka’s state gig-workers Act, already requires algorithmic transparency, a human point of contact, recognises a rider’s right to refuse tasks, and places safety duties on the platforms themselves. None of this appears in the central rules.

But India is not the only country whose delivery riders are dying to an app’s schedule, so it is worth asking what everyone else did. Spain went to the root and changed what a rider is. Its 2021 “Riders’ Law” presumes delivery riders are employees, so safety duties follow automatically, because an employer owes its employees safety as a matter of course. The European Union’s 2024 Platform Work Directive goes into the software itself. Under this directive, platforms must disclose how their systems assign, rate and penalise work. A human must be in the loop on significant decisions, and nobody can be dismissed by automated decision alone. This applies to all workers, employee or not. Notably, Karnataka’s state Act follows the same approach.

The trouble, however, is that a rider who knows exactly what the fine for a late drop will still want to ride fast enough to avoid it. China is then the interesting case because its regulators grasped this and went one step further, into what the algorithm is allowed to demand in the first place. After a 2020 exposé documented riders forced to speed and run lights to escape late-delivery fines, China’s regulators ordered platforms in 2021 to free riders from “unreasonable” algorithmic demands, relax delivery-time windows, and ensure traffic safety. By 2025 the dominant platform was phasing out the late-delivery penalty altogether, and replaced it with rewards for punctuality, saying openly that the aim was fewer traffic violations caused by rushing. China did this while its riders, like India’s, mostly remained outside employee status.

Nothing set out above, if turned into an amendment, would be strange to Indian law. The Supreme Court held in Consumer Education & Research Centre v. Union of India that the duty to secure safe working conditions is part of the right to life under Article 21 of the Indian Constitution and binds the producer directly. More recently, the Supreme Court since 2001, has already been deliberating upon the Constitutional argument that denying gig workers social security – violates the rights to equality and life, with the Court pressing the Union over its delays in bringing into force the very Code this piece has examined. At a hearing in early 2025, Justice Datta asked Zomato’s counsel to end ten-minute deliveries, warning that riders “will die on the road.” A legislature that acts now would not be importing a foreign idea, it would be answering questions its own Supreme Court is already asking, before the Court answers it first.