On June 12, in Geneva, the International Labour Conference adopted Convention No. 193, ‘Decent Work in the Platform Economy’, which is the first binding international treaty written for the rider, driver, picker and data-labeller who earns a living through an app. The vote was lopsided: 406 in favour (which included nations such as China, Brazil, Germany, France, South Africa, and Japan), 8 against, and 36 abstentions.

India abstained. Under the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) tripartite system, each country votes through three delegates. Only India’s government abstained; its employer and worker delegates voted in favour.

Abstention is not neutrality. It is a decision to maintain distance from a treaty that millions of workers waited two years to win.

What India walked away from

Convention No. 193 does what India’s own laws refuse to. It extends a floor of rights to platform workers regardless of classification, even if a company calls them “employees” or “independent partners”. Core protections, which include pay as per the statutory or negotiated minimum; on-time payment; occupational safety and health; and social security on terms no less favourable than what comparable workers receive, apply to all.

The Convention also enters territory no global standard has touched — algorithmic management, the opaque software that allocates work, sets pay, monitors performance, and silently deactivates accounts. Platforms must now disclose significant automated decisions, explain them in writing, and keep a human in the loop. Further, Article 9 of the Convention strikes at the gig economy’s central fiction: governments must classify workers correctly, guided “mainly by the facts relating to the performance of work” and by what the worker does.

It is no utopian document. It is a floor for worker’s rights that India’s gig workers currently do not stand on.

India’s gig workforce stood at roughly 7.7 million in 2020-21. By NITI Aayog’s own projection, it will reach 2.35 crore by 2029-30, about 6.7% of the non-agricultural workforce. This is no longer the urban side-hustle of marketing decks. Gig work is now becoming the mode through which India’s cities are fed, moved and supplied.

Further, NITI Aayog data shows that about 39% of gig workers earn ₹10,000-₹25,000 a month and 34% earn ₹25,000-₹40,000, with wages stretched across 12-hour shifts; fuel paid for by the worker himself; and no overtime, because overtime requires an employer to exist. Only about 15% have any social security. The rest ride into Indian traffic each morning with no accident cover, no sick pay, no pension, and an algorithm that can switch off their income without explanation.

The government’s defenders will say that India needs no Geneva treaty because it has its own framework. The Code on Social Security, 2020, part of the four Labour Codes brought into force in November 2025, was among the world’s first central laws to define “gig worker” and “platform worker”. It directs aggregators to pay 1%-2% of their annual turnover, capped at 5% of worker payouts, into a social security fund.

While on paper, this sounds like leadership, in practice, it is a promise printed and shelved. Neither the central law nor most of the State laws specify the nature, quantum or eligibility of benefits. The contribution mechanism remains largely un-operationalised and the schemes are notional. Meanwhile, the real laws have come from the States: Rajasthan’s Platform-Based Gig Workers Act of 2023, and the welfare boards drafted in Karnataka and Telangana. The Centre abstains in Geneva while its own States legislate.

India’s abstention at the Conference reads less like a one-off position than a habit. India is a founding member of the ILO and has ratified six of the eight core conventions. It has not ratified Convention No. 87 (Freedom of Association) or No. 98 (Right to Organise and Collective Bargaining) because they would give government servants the right to strike, which domestic rules bar. Nor has it ratified Convention No. 190 on violence and harassment at work.

A founder of the ILO that will not sign the ILO’s own guarantees is not a country caught off-guard. It has a settled posture: endorse the principle but withhold the obligation. The logic is consistent. India ratifies Conventions only once national law is in full conformity. There is a federalism argument too, as labour is a concurrent subject. But abstention does not protect federalism; the States are already moving.

What abstention costs

When a country ratifies an ILO convention and writes it into domestic law, a worker can sue a platform for redress. Abstention forecloses that future. It tells every aggregator in India that the classification fiction is safe here and that the algorithm need not explain itself. It widens the gap between a delivery worker in China, who will have rights, and one in Chennai, who will not.

The government had a choice between the worker and the platform, and in one of the most public forums on earth it chose to make no choice at all, which, when one party holds the app and the other the handlebars, is the same as choosing the app.

The World Bank estimates that 154-435 million people already earn through platforms worldwide. Twenty-three and a half million of them will be Indian by 2030. They delivered the meal. The least their government owed them was a show of hands.

Rejimon Kuttappan is a workers’ rights advocate

Published - July 30, 2026 01:15 am IST