Written by Aryan Verma, a second year LL.B. (Hons.) student at the University of Allahabad
I. Introduction
Every day, millions of Indians summon a ride, order food, or book a home visit through an app – and increasingly, the person on the other end of that transaction is a woman driving a cab, delivering the order, or arriving to clean a house or repair an appliance. The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013 (“PoSH Act”) was written to guarantee every working woman a workplace free of harassment. Whether that guarantee reaches this newer, app-mediated workforce is now the subject of a genuine and unresolved legal contest – one playing out in a stayed Karnataka High Court judgment, and in the silences between India’s newest labour legislation and its oldest gender-justice statute.
In September 2024, a single judge of the Karnataka High Court held, for what commentators described as among the first such rulings in Indian labour jurisprudence, that a driver on a ride-hailing platform was an “employee” for the purposes of the PoSH Act. The ruling has since been stayed on appeal, but it reopened a question Indian labour law has never quite settled: does the gig economy’s vast, dispersed workforce fall within the protective umbrella the PoSH Act was built to provide? This piece argues that the honest answer, at present, is an uneasy and lopsided one. The law has been read expansively to fix responsibility on platforms when their workers cause harm to others. It has not yet been read with the same generosity to protect the platform workers – disproportionately women, in several segments of this economy – from the harm they face while earning a living.
II. A Statute Built for a Fixed Address
The PoSH Act’s architecture anticipated a workforce organised around identifiable employers, defined premises, and a stable roster of employees. Section 2(f) defines “employee” broadly – covering regular, temporary, ad hoc, and daily-wage workers, engaged directly or through an agent, with or without the knowledge of the principal employer, remunerated or not. Section 2(o) defines “workplace” with comparable breadth, extending to any place an employee visits in connection with employment, including transport arranged by the employer. Every establishment with ten or more workers must constitute an Internal Committee; smaller establishments and the unorganised sector instead fall within the jurisdiction of a district-level Local Committee under sections 6 and 7.
What this architecture has rarely had to confront is a workplace with no fixed address at all: a driver’s cab, a delivery rider’s two-wheeler, a home-service worker’s client’s living room – locations generated afresh with every task by an algorithm, for a workforce whose very relationship with the platform connecting them remains legally contested.
III. The Ola Judgment: An Employee by Any Other Name
In August 2018, a woman travelling in an Ola cab was sexually harassed by her driver during the ride. She complained to Ola’s Internal Committee under section 9 of the PoSH Act; the Committee declined to act, taking the position that driver-partners were independent contractors rather than Ola’s employees, and that the complaint therefore fell outside its jurisdiction. The resulting writ petition became X v Internal Complaints Committee, ANI Technologies Pvt Ltd (Karnataka HC, 30 September 2024).
Justice M.G.S. Kamal’s judgment rejected Ola’s description of itself as a mere intermediary connecting drivers and riders. The Court found that Ola exercised substantial control over its driver-partners – over fares, routes, and standards of conduct – and could not exercise that degree of control while simultaneously disclaiming responsibility for it. Reading section 2(f) purposively, the Court held that a driver-subscriber was an “employee” for the purposes of the PoSH Act, and directed the Committee to conduct an inquiry, awarding the petitioner ₹5 lakh in compensation and ₹50,000 in costs.
By most accounts, this was among the first Indian judicial pronouncements to place gig workers within the “employee” category of any labour statute. It was also short-lived in its immediate effect. Ola appealed, and within days a Division Bench stayed the operation of the judgment. That appeal remains pending at the time of writing, and the question it will ultimately settle – whether a platform is an employer for PoSH Act purposes – is, for now, unresolved.
What deserves closer attention is who this judgment protected. The aggrieved person was a passenger, not a platform worker. The “employee” finding was reached to fix Ola’s responsibility for a driver’s misconduct toward a third party – an important development for passenger safety, but not, in itself, a ruling about the safety of the women who drive, deliver, and provide services on these very platforms. The reasoning that secured a passenger’s right to a hearing has not yet been tested – let alone applied – in a case where the complainant is the platform worker herself.
IV. The Mirror That Doesn’t Reflect
That gap is not hypothetical. Women now make up an estimated 28 per cent of India’s gig workforce, and a growing body of reporting finds that those in customer-facing platform work – ride-hailing, delivery, and home services – routinely encounter harassment from customers, with few structured avenues to complain. Unlike an employee who reports to the same office each morning, a platform worker’s “workplace” is generated anew with every task, making it genuinely unclear which entity’s Internal Committee – if any – has jurisdiction, and whether an aggregator can be compelled to constitute one at all, absent a finding of the kind the Ola judgment reached and which currently stands stayed. Some platforms have added safety features such as SOS buttons, helplines, and the option to block a customer, but these depend on the worker filing a complaint after the fact, and fall well short of the structured, appealable inquiry process the PoSH Act contemplates; reviews of major platforms’ terms of service have found that few mention a workplace sexual harassment policy at all.
V. Between Two Codes
The irony sharpens against the backdrop of India’s other major labour law development of the past year. On 21 November 2025, the Government of India brought the four Labour Codes into effect, among them the Code on Social Security, 2020, which for the first time gives gig and platform workers statutory recognition at the national level. The Code separately defines a “gig worker,” “platform work,” “platform worker,” and “aggregator,” and requires aggregators to contribute between one and two per cent of annual turnover – capped at five per cent of amounts paid to such workers – into a Social Security Fund, financing schemes for life and disability cover, accident insurance, health and maternity benefits, and old-age protection.
This is a genuine advance, but in one specific register only: income security. It says nothing about harassment, and could not easily be read to, since the PoSH Act is a separate, free-standing statute administered by the Ministry of Women and Child Development, and was never among the twenty-nine enactments the four Codes consolidated. The result is two parallel legal universes. One, under the Ministry of Labour and Employment, increasingly treats gig and platform workers as a distinct category worthy of statutory welfare. The other, under the Ministry of Women and Child Development, has yet to say clearly whether that same worker counts as an “employee” entitled to a workplace free of harassment – a question presently parked before a stayed High Court order. State legislation has not filled the space either: the Rajasthan Platform Based Gig Workers (Registration and Welfare) Act, 2023, arguably the most developed state framework of its kind, builds a welfare board, a cess-funded fund, and a grievance mechanism for entitlements and payments, but is silent on sexual harassment and workplace safety altogether.
It’s not only a domestic issue of uncertainty about the PoSH Act. From one jurisdiction to the next, policymakers are starting to ask themselves about what protection for workers on platforms should look like. The recent resolutions at the International Labour Organisation (ILO), hence, are an excellent pointer to gauge India’s present regime.
VI. The View from Geneva
This gap has, in a short time since this piece was first conceived, acquired an international dimension. On 12 June 2026, the International Labour Conference adopted Convention No. 193 concerning Decent Work in the Platform Economy – the first-ever binding international labour standard on gig and platform work. Adopted by 406 votes to 8, with 36 abstentions, the Convention applies to platform workers regardless of formal classification, and its provisions extend to occupational safety and protection from violence and harassment, including harassment by third parties such as clients and customers – a category of particular relevance to platform work performed inside a customer’s vehicle, home, or premises. In substance, it carries the logic of the ILO’s 2019 Violence and Harassment Convention, which already protects workers irrespective of their contractual status, directly into the platform economy.
India’s government delegate abstained from the vote, even as India’s own workers’ and employers’ delegates – the country’s other two constituents in the ILO’s tripartite structure – voted in favour, leaving the Government isolated within its own delegation. Abstention does not amount to a rejection of the Convention, and India remains free to ratify Convention No. 193 at any time in the future. The vote, however, is a pyrrhic victory in a sense, as it is a reflection of current Indian attitudes, ready to accept that gig and platform workers should have access to a welfare fund; not quite ready to believe that gig and platform workers should be accorded the same protections as everyone else when it comes to being safe from violence and harassment.
The importance of Convention No. 193 is that it establishes a principle relevant to the present debate, not because it automatically changes Indian law. The Convention extends workplace protection to platform workers regardless of their contractual status. This approach is very similar to the ambiguous question left by the PoSH Act, about whether or not women onboarded as partners or independent contractors would be entitled to statutory protection even if the relationship is argued to be a voluntary one.
Convention No. 193, which has not yet been ratified by any country, including India, is classification-neutral, which means it gives good guidance for domestic reform.
VII. Bridging the Gap: A Way Forward
None of this has to be awaited by the Karnataka Division Bench, although it may make a difference. There are a few additional steps that can be taken.
First, Parliament could choose to clarify the definition directly at the point where the definition is required and for a specific purpose such as social security benefits, following the purpose-specific, sui generis recognition already given by the Code on Social Security to gig workers, rather than engaging in a more abstract debate over whether gig workers are “employees” for any purpose.
Second, perhaps the registries and compliance structures under the Code on Social Security and one or more state “gig-worker” laws should be extended, not just encouraged, to allow worker bases of aggregators to form their own “Internal Committees” that can effectively reach such workers. There is an administrative structure in place to identify, register and connect these workers-but this is not currently its function.
Third, and more immediately, there may be an opportunity for platform workers through the Local Committees (section 6) and the Local Committee mechanism under section 7. However, the present framework does not adequately address their mode of work, which remains problematic.
Fourth, India today has a practical template, rather than mere guidance, in Convention No. 193. However, it is not necessary to adopt the Convention formally in order to adopt its underlying logic, which is classification agnostic – either the contractors are called independent contractors or platform workers, protections must follow regardless of the classification used. Even without such a move, the underlying approach-classification-agnostic protections that travel with the worker-can be adopted through domestic rule-making under the Labour Codes and the PoSH Act.
VIII. Conclusion
The significance of the Ola judgment lies in its demonstration of an Indian court’s ability to sidestep a platform’s preferred language – partner, subscriber, intermediary – and get to the nitty-gritty of their control. This judicial approach must now be directed at the women themselves who work on these platforms, rather than at their customers. No law or policy that recognises a gig worker for the purposes of pension or welfare can, without some embarrassment, remain silent on whether she is a worker for the purposes of protecting her safety and dignity while earning her livelihood.
Caveat: The views, analyses, and information presented in this article are provided in good faith and for general informational purposes only. No representation or warranty, express or implied, is made regarding the accuracy, adequacy, validity, reliability, or completeness of the information. Readers should conduct their own research and seek professional guidance where appropriate. Neither the author nor the publisher shall be held responsible for any loss, liability, or consequence arising from reliance on this content.
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