Missing Labour in the Regulatory Discourse: The Case of Bike-Taxi Services in India

In the context of the recent ban on bike-taxis in Karnataka and the discussions emanated henceforth, the present paper critically analyses the logic and evolution of policy and regulatory framework vis-à-vis bike-taxis in India. It is viewed that the regulatory discourse on bike-taxis in the Indian context is over dominated by concerns of urban mobility, licensing and customer safety. In such a situation, there is a gross neglect of the labour and employment insecurities of the large pool of informal gig workers in this sector, who are already subject to acute forms of precarious work. The paper details the insecure employment conditions and examines how these are exacerbated by the app-based aggregation models. It analyses state interventions to see how concerns around labour have been discussed in them. Based on this critical assessment and extant empirical insights, the paper argues for a fundamental paradigm-shift towards a labour-centric approach in policy and legal intervention.