For 100 Million Migrant Workers, the Platform Economy Is Broken. Here’s What Comes Next.
Every platform begins with a promise. The earliest marketplaces, from online classifieds to today’s gig economy super-apps, all sold us the same story: that with enough code, you could scale supply and demand, eliminate inefficiency, and create value out of chaos.
For a while, it worked. The numbers went up. The charts looked right. Capital pivoted to fund their extravagant and high burn rates.
But here’s what the pitch decks don’t show you: In India’s gig economy, worker churn runs between 40–60% annually. That’s not a bug—it’s a feature of platforms that treat human movement like packet routing.
The more profound truth—one that India is learning as the gig economy enters its next act—is that platforms are inherently brittle. They thrive on the margins of what’s easy: matching, routing, and extracting a small fee from a large volume of transactions. But the moment the supply chain becomes human, every shortcut is uncovered.
The reality behind the interface is one of informality, fragmentation, and risk. This isn’t just an inconvenience; studies estimate the friction of migration—the endless search for work, insecure housing, and wage delays—can cost a worker up to two months of income each year.
I met a delivery worker in Bengaluru last month. He’d cycled through three platform jobs in six weeks, each promising “guaranteed earnings”. What he got instead: unclear payouts with penalties he didn’t understand, no accommodation support, and a different app to learn each time.
The platforms counted him as three new user acquisitions. He counted it as three failures.
Platforms, by design, do not build or own the infrastructure that enables movement. They simply route people and transactions through existing, often broken systems. When 100 million Indians migrate for work each year, what they need isn’t another app—it’s the boring essentials: reliable housing networks, standardized onboarding, and portable benefits. Infrastructure isn’t glamorous, but it endures.
This isn’t just a local story. Global platforms have faced the exact limits of the asset-light model. Uber’s path to profitability took 14 years and required expanding into logistics infrastructure. Amazon abandoned its pure marketplace model to build a vast network of warehouses. The pattern is clear: sustainable scale depends on owning the rails, not just the routing.
India’s next decade won’t be defined by which platform moves the most people fastest, but by who builds the backbone. This reality is giving rise to a new model, one that moves beyond the asset-light playbook. We call it IAAS—Infrastructure-as-a-Service.
It’s the full-stack answer to migration.
Imagine: a worker arrives in a new city not to uncertainty, but to a pre-vetted room. Her skills have already been verified and are visible to a network of trusted employers. Her health benefits and work history accompany her, establishing a portable identity of trust. This is the shift: we stop just routing demand and start constructing the channels that make demand flow reliably and safely.
The change is already happening. Smart money is moving from platforms to infrastructure. Enterprises tired of 50% churn rates are looking for partners who own the entire value chain, not just the top layer. The workers are done downloading their seventh job app this year.
Platforms were a feature of the last decade. Infrastructure will define the next.
I'm documenting India’s infrastructure revolution in real time. Every morning, I share what’s happening on the ground—from construction sites to boardrooms, from worker dormitories to policy meetings. To understand how 100 million people truly interact with India’s economy, subscribe.
What I’m tracking this week: The Tamil Nadu government’s new migrant worker database—finally, a government building the boring infrastructure that matters.
Recommend Gig Work India to your readers
I write from the blind spots of the Indian economy — where labor moves, systems fail, and no one’s accountable. This is not commentary. It’s documentation. Built while building. Written while working. No performative noise.
- Marketplace Company
Documenting India’s gig economy from the ground up. Subscribe now
Sachin Chhabra
Real stories from India’s economic blind spots. Built while building. Subscribe now