CONTROL WITHOUT RESPONSIBILITY: PLATFORM GOVERNANCE AND THE MISCLASSIFICATION OF GIG WORKERS UNDER INDIAN LABOUR LAW

India's labour law struggles to classify app based riders under existing categories of employment and self employment. He is not an employee, the contract says so explicitly. He is not self-employed either, the algorithm decides where he goes, what he earns, and whether he may continue working at all. The numbers behind this contradiction are striking from 7.7 million gig workers in 2020-21 to roughly 12 million by 2024-25, with projections of 23.5 million by 2029-30 and a GDP contribution estimated at ₹2.35 lakh crore . This expansion has proceeded alongside a legal fiction that courts have the tools to dismantle but have not yet been asked to: that the rider is a free agent, not a worker. This paper undertakes a socio-legal analysis of app-based gig work in India, grounded in T.H. Marshall's theory of social citizenship and the capabilities approach of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, and drawing on ILO Recommendation No. 198 (2006) as an interpretive standard alongside Indian constitutional and statutory law. The analysis proceeds through four Parts: a legal and doctrinal inquiry into misclassification under Indian jurisprudence, a constitutional analysis under Articles 14, 19, and 21, and an examination of the Code on Social Security, 2020 and the Rajasthan Platform Based Gig Workers Act, 2023; a socio-legal examination of financial precarity, algorithmic control, occupational risk, gender-differentiated outcomes, and workers' data rights under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023; evidence-based policy recommendations grounded in Indian legislative experience and ILO standards; and primary survey data gathered from food delivery workers in Pune. The paper concludes that naming gig workers in statute whilst denying them enforceable rights is not reform, it is a holding position that serves platforms rather than workers and argues for the legislative changes necessary to close that gap.