The gig economy in India is turning into a staffing market

For most of the last decade a delivery rider in Bengaluru and a warehouse picker in Bhiwandi were, in legal terms, nobody's employee. The platform called them partners. No staffing company carried them on its books. If a retailer wanted two hundred people for a festive-season surge, there was no clean way to borrow them from an app that already had them on the road.

That has changed, and the cause is law rather than software.

01What the social security code actually did

The Code on Social Security came into force on 21 November 2025, one of the four labour codes that replaced 29 older central laws. It defines gig and platform workers in statute for the first time. It also puts a bill on the aggregators: between 1% and 2% of annual turnover into a social security fund, capped at 5% of what they pay out to those workers.

The paperwork followed in 2026. The central rules took effect in May, and a Labour Ministry circular gave aggregators until 21 June to onboard onto the eShram portal and integrate by API so that every engaged worker is reported. Zomato, Swiggy, Blinkit, Uber, Ola and Amazon were among those already connected before the deadline.

Put those pieces together and a gig worker now has a portable identity, a benefits record and a counterparty that answers to a regulator. That is the minimum a business needs before it can contract for someone's labour at scale.

03Who has already moved

The incumbents noticed early. Quess Corp, the largest staffing firm in India by SIA's 2024 ranking, bought 49% of Taskmo, a B2B gig marketplace, in 2021. It raised that to 53.91% in 2022 and completed the buyout when Taskmo's founders exited in 2024. That sequence is the signal: a listed staffing company decided it was cheaper to own a gig deployment engine than to build one.

The pattern to expect is more of the same. Staffing firms buying gig marketplaces for their matching data, and gig marketplaces adding payroll and compliance so they can sell to enterprises that will not take on misclassification risk themselves.

05What to do with this

If you are an investor, value a consumer platform on its core service and treat any workforce business as an option you are not paying for yet. The direct exposure is in B2B gig marketplaces and in staffing firms that have bought or built one. Ask what share of their deployed workers are registered and how many enterprise contracts sit on top.

If you are a founder building in this space, the defensible asset is compliance done at the level of the individual shift: who worked, for which client, under which state's rules, with which contribution paid. Matching is getting cheaper every year. Clean records of formal work are not.

If you run an MSME that hires seasonal labour, the codes change your exposure too. Engaging gig workers through a registered intermediary that handles contributions is now the safer route than paying cash through a contractor.

For the full market picture, including where margins sit along the value chain, see our recruitment and staffing industry report. For how the gig layer fits among the other ways to invest in hiring, see India's talent economy as an investment theme, and the sector overview on our staffing and recruitment industry page.