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The doorbell rings. It’s a young man in a branded T-shirt, a thermal bag slung over his shoulder, handing over your late-night biryani. You thank him, he nods, and he’s off—a fleeting, transactional part of your day. A few hours earlier, a different young man, navigating by the blue dot on his phone, drove you home from the office. These individuals are the lifeblood of modern urban India, the human cogs in the magnificent, on-demand machine we call convenience. They are everywhere.
And yet, in the grand ledger of the Indian state, they are practically ghosts. The upcoming 2027 Census is embarking on its most crucial and complex hunt yet: to count this vast, invisible army and, in doing so, to finally acknowledge the new face of the Indian working class.
An Army of App-ointed ‘Partners’
Back in 2011, when the last Census was conducted, the world of work in India was, for the most part, neatly classifiable. You were a farmer, a shopkeeper (dukandar), a government servant (sarkari naukri), a factory worker, or a professional. The enumerator’s form had a box for you.
Fast forward to today. A NITI Aayog report estimates that India’s gig workforce will swell to 2.35 crore (23.5 million) people by 2029-30. These are the drivers for Ola and Uber, the delivery partners for Zomato and Swiggy, the pickers for Blinkit and Instamart, and the millions of freelancers—coders, writers, designers—offering their skills on platforms like Upwork.
The problem? They don’t fit into any of the old boxes. They are not ’employees’ in the traditional sense; they are famously, and litigiously, referred to as ‘partners’ by the platforms. They don’t have a fixed place of work. Their income is variable. Many of them work multiple gigs simultaneously. They are, in essence, a new economic species for which our statistical taxonomy has no name. They are the ghosts in our economic machine.
The Enumerator’s Ultimate Challenge: “So, What Do You Do?”
Imagine a Census enumerator, a government schoolteacher named Mrs. Das, knocking on a door in a modest housing society in Pune. A 24-year-old man, Sameer, opens the door. Mrs. Das, tablet in hand, begins the time-honoured ritual. She reaches the question: “Aap kaam kya karte hain?” (What work do you do?).
Sameer pauses. From 8 AM to 1 PM, he’s an Uber driver, making the most of the morning airport runs. During the lunch peak, from 1 PM to 3 PM, he switches on his Swiggy app for food deliveries. In the evenings, he logs into an online platform to do a few hours of data entry work for a US-based client.
What is Sameer’s primary occupation? Is he a ‘transport worker’? A ‘delivery person’? A ‘data processor’? Is he ‘self-employed’? Or is he, as he feels on most days, simply a hustler patching together a livelihood from the pixels on his smartphone screen?
This isn’t a hypothetical scenario. It is the central challenge facing the 2027 Census. How do you design a questionnaire that captures the fluid, portfolio-based nature of gig work? The traditional concept of a single, stable job is an anachronism for millions. Forcing Sameer into an outdated box—say, ‘driver’—instantly renders the rest of his economic reality invisible. The Census, the most detailed portrait of our nation, would be publishing a heavily photoshopped picture.
Why Counting These Ghosts is a National Imperative
This isn’t just a matter of statistical neatness. The failure to accurately see and count the gig workforce has profound consequences for both the workers and the nation.
1. The Social Security Black Hole: The Code on Social Security, 2020, was a landmark piece of legislation that, for the first time, officially recognised ‘gig workers’ and promised to create social security schemes for them. But how do you design a pension fund or a health insurance scheme for a group of people whose very numbers, income levels, and work hours are a matter of guesswork? Without credible Census data, this promise remains an ambition on paper, leaving millions of workers without a safety net in a precarious line of work.
2. The Blind Spots in Urban Planning: The anonymised data on the daily commute of workers has always been a vital input for urban planning. Now, imagine having a real-time understanding of the movement patterns of tens of thousands of delivery partners and cab drivers. This data could revolutionise traffic management, identify the need for public restrooms and rest stops, and inform the planning of last-mile public transport. By not counting them properly, our city planners are designing for a city of yesterday.
3. Decoding the Real Economy: Is the gig economy a stepping stone to better opportunities, or is it a form of disguised unemployment where people are overworked and underpaid? Is it empowering women and people from smaller towns to join the workforce, or is it creating a new class of digital serfs? We have passionate arguments on both sides, but very little nationwide data. The Census is our only tool to get a definitive, unbiased answer, which is crucial for shaping labour policy, skill development initiatives, and financial inclusion models.
The Evolving Definition of ‘Kaam’
The rise of the gig economy is more than just an economic shift; it’s a cultural one. It is fundamentally changing the ancient Indian concept of ‘kaam’ (work). It is decoupling work from a physical location (‘daftar’). It is challenging the notion of a lifelong career in a single domain. It represents the ultimate expression of modern hustle, where adaptability, multitasking, and a constant ‘on’ mode are the keys to survival.
This new class of workers embodies the spirit of individual enterprise, the ultimate jugaadu navigating a complex system. They are, in a sense, the foot soldiers of the digital economy, connecting the online world of apps to the offline world of goods and services. To leave them out of our national narrative is to misunderstand the very nature of modern Indian commerce.
The 2027 Census will be the first time the Indian state formally tries to shake hands with this new digital working class. The process will be imperfect, the classifications will be debated, and the data will likely raise more questions than it answers. But it will be a beginning. It will be the moment the ghosts finally begin to appear in the official family portrait of the nation. And by seeing them, we will not only be acknowledging their existence; we will be forced to confront the future of work in India itself.
Have you ever worked in the gig economy? How would you answer the enumerator’s question? Share this article and your story, and let’s start a conversation about how we recognise India’s new workforce.
