Written by Abhishek Gope, 3rd Year, B.A LL.B (Hons), Chanakya National Law University, Patna and Namrata Nitya 2nd Year, B.B.A LL.B (Hons) Central University of South Bihar, Gaya

INTRODUCTION

One morning, a delivery rider logs in to her app and finds orders as usual. Rather, she receives one message: Your account has been permanently deactivated. There is no explanation with it. It was preceded by no warning. There may be no meaningful avenue to challenge it. In the end, she has no source of income left.

Such scenes are becoming commonplace as the gig economy in India expands rapidly, with the NITI Aayog report projecting India’s gig worker population to reach nearly 7.7 million in 2020-21 and to expand to 23.5 million by 2030. Workers rely entirely on algorithms of these platforms for order, rating, incentive and, ultimately, access to work. The platform’s “deactivation” is the equivalent of “dismissal” here, and it doesn’t take long for the worker’s working life to be destroyed. While platforms may have legitimate reasons to act against genuine misconduct, permanently cutting off a worker’s livelihood without notice, reasons, or a chance to be heard raises serious concerns of procedural fairness and labour justice.

WHY DEACTIVATION HAS BECOME A LABOUR LAW ISSUE

Deactivation is frequently presented by the platforms as part of their account management functions, but in reality, deactivation more resembles a dismissal than merely revoking access. It is not a logging-out process and is also not a suspension. It is an expression of how the platform dismisses a worker, cuts his or her sole means of livelihood and leaves no record of who decided to do it, why the person was dismissed and what choices are open to him or her. Deactivation may not neatly align with conventional notions of dismissal or retrenchment, as gig workers are not necessarily employees. However, when it comes to its effects, permanent deactivation can have a similar effect to termination, in that it provides a barrier to work and income.

Several different reasons for workers to be deactivated are complaints by customers, multiple cancellations, fraud, rating below a predetermined threshold, not active for an extended period, misconduct, violation of the code of conduct, etc. If the rating of a worker is below the threshold, he can be denied access to the platform in its entirety, and the algorithm sets all the routes and prices unilaterally.

What makes it a labour law issue, rather than just a breach of contract issue, is the magnitude of the loss. Whereas an ordinary app user loses nothing of significance when deactivated, a deactivated worker loses his/her earnings potential, the incentive already received, any future work available on that particular platform, the built-up digital reputation and often the only means of livelihood.

Once deactivation is made the deciding factor as to whether or not someone can continue to earn a living, it is no longer an internal matter for the two contractual parties but is an issue of labour rights and workplace management, which Indian labour law, still stuck in its binary notion of employer-employee relations, has yet to come to grips with.

WHY GIG WORKERS NEED A RIGHT TO APPEAL BEFORE DEACTIVATION?

Platform work is becoming the main source of livelihood for a significant portion of the working population in India. A platform with a permanent ban cannot only limit access to an app, but can also take away a person’s earning potential. This is where dignity of labour and the constitutional meaning of the right to life in Article 21 comes in – not in the sense of making a lawful argument, but as a reminder that the right to livelihood is not a right that platforms can turn on or off at their discretion. Workers in such cases typically do not receive written reasons for their dismissal, do not have any evidence, and do not have an internal appeal – which leaves only litigation, but that is something most gig workers cannot afford.

Audi alteram partem, or the rule of letting the other party hear the other side, is recognised in ordinary employment law, and it is to be hoped that this principle will be maintained. The maxim of Audi Alteram Partem provides for a suitable standard in such a situation. The Supreme Court has stressed in the case of A.K. Kraipak v Union of India that no decision which has severe implications can ignore the aspect of procedural justice. Although this case involved a public law issue, it becomes significant here because of the underlying principle. However, in practice, platforms can easily terminate worker accounts with little or no explanation, and without any way for workers to have any kind of grievance redress system. Basic fairness requirements should not be lost entirely when a human manager is replaced by a script.

Platforms have full visibility of ratings, complaints and algorithmic flags, while workers generally do not. If a worker is deactivated overnight, they typically are not able to determine which of the rules were violated, if they were being reported or not, nor if an algorithm was wrong or not. The Karnataka Bill to regulate gig workers up to 2025 in India has tried to start remedying this situation by providing for written reasons and prior notice before deactivation. However, the success of these protections is contingent on whether the workers can make sense of the algorithmic reasoning of such decisions.

False complaints, confusion of identity, technological issues, and malicious complaints are not infrequent instances; they are known risks of using any mass-scale system that relies on algorithms. The examples of conflicts prove this point: In Varanasi, more than 150 employees of the company Blinkit were blocked from using their IDs after they went on strike, and the issue has now reached the Karnataka High Court, where major platform companies have challenged the 2025 Act and related measures, including requirements concerning deactivation and internal grievance mechanisms. When there is no independent authority considering a complaint about a deactivation, the platform plays the role of the complainant, the investigator, and the judge at once.

Combined, these four strands indicate that a system with no meaningful challenges for the deactivation of the system can easily be substituted by unilateral digital control.

TOWARDS A FAIR DEACTIVATION FRAMEWORK

This gap does not have to be answered merely in abstract terms of the need for regulation by the government; it can be answered in specific terms. The platforms must give reasons in writing before any permanent deactivation, must differentiate between temporary suspension and permanent deactivation, must allow workers to present their side of the story before the decision is made, must have an independent appeal process rather than make the appeal process go back to the same committee that made the original decision, must decide appeals within a definite period of time and must have a human being rather than a script verify any permanent deactivation. Karnataka is also moving along these lines. The Karnataka 2025 Act prescribes that there should be a comprehensive list of grounds for deactivation, reasons, fourteen days’ prior notice and observance of natural justice, along with a grievance-redressal process.

From an international perspective, the Platform Work Directive (2024/2831) of the EU is worth considering, which mandates that platforms disclose the impact of algorithms on task assignment and disciplinary processes, and that decisions of suspension and termination of the account of a worker should be revisited by a trained individual who could override the decision. Nothing about this necessitates any copying in toto; it only demonstrates that deactivation is increasingly becoming a governance challenge, rather than a technology switch.

CONCLUSION

Return to the rider: any message on a screen should not be the definitive and indisputable statement on whether or not there’s a human behind the wheel doing the job. While any deactivation may be justified if there is any actual wrongdoing, no such authority should be completely irreviewable and impenetrable. The State of Karnataka’s proposed framework for 2025 is a significant shift towards accommodating gig economy workers’ need for reasons, notice, and redressal avenues. But the difficulty is in keeping those protections when workers are making decisions with the assistance of an algorithm they don’t know. The interests of protecting the workers and the development of innovative technologies do not need to be antithetical in the era of platform labour in India’s economy. Technology may automate decisions, but accountability cannot be automated away.

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