Gig Economy in the Global South

Urban women’s participation in India’s labour market remains limited despite rising overall female labour force participation. This article examines whether platform work can enable women’s economic empowerment. It finds that platforms often reproduce inequalities through unpaid care burdens, unsafe mobility, and weak protections. Without improved infrastructure, childcare, safety, and labour protections, it risks becoming digitised informality rather than a pathway to mobility.

India's welfare state is held together by over five million women, namely the ASHA workers, Anganwadi workers, and mid-day meal workers & helpers, who deliver essential public services daily, yet remain classified as 'volunteers', denied fair wages, formal contracts, and basic protections. This is no accident: with women already spending nearly twice as much time on caregiving as men, the state has long relied on deeply entrenched gender norms to keep care work cheap and informal. In this piece Renjini Rajagopalan makes the case for why it's time to move beyond the honorary label and recognise care work for what it truly is: work.

The DDU-GKY scheDespite schemes like DDU-GKY, formal skilling remains limited for rural youth, with only about 3.9 % accessing structured training compared with 7.1 % in urban areas. Persistent barriers such as low awareness, uneven outreach, mobility constraints, and social norms, particularly affect women’s participation. JJN’s research highlights that addressing these structural and social challenges is crucial to making skill training inclusive and effective for rural youth.me was designed to bridge skilling and formal jobs for rural youth. However, low awareness, distant placements, social factors, and curriculum gaps hinder uptake.

At the AICESIS panel in Curaçao, Sabina Dewan highlighted how AI is accelerating inequalities and emphasised that without human-centric regulation, social protection, and renewed social dialogue, AI’s disruptions risk undermining workers and economies—particularly in the Global South.

India's rapid transition toward electric vehicles (EVs) is reshaping the country's industrial landscape and workforce dynamics. Yet we know surprisingly little about the broader impact of this shift on labour markets. JustJobs Network is seeking to address this knowledge gap through its leadership of the FutureWORKS Collective, an initiative funded by the International Development Research Centre. Our first project under the banner of decarbonization and jobs examines how this transition will affect regional economies and labour markets.

In a landmark shift, the Supreme Court's 2025 ruling in Dharam Singh & Anr. v. State of UP & Anr. declared that "perennial work deserves perennial posts". Breaking from decades of judicial precedent, the court held that long-serving daily wage workers in government service performing essential, continuous functions must be regularised, with full employment benefits. The judgment directly challenges past rulings that treated temporary government employment as inherently non-regularisable, instead emphasizing the nature and continuity of the work as central to constitutional fairness.

HSBC's Quality of Life report reveals a shift among Gen Z from traditional wealth accumulation to seeking balance, fulfilment, and purpose, with "multi retirements" emerging as a trend. But Sabina Dewan highlights this perspective reflects the privileged few. In India and other developing countries, most young people continue to struggle with low earnings and lack of social security and even well-paying jobs can feel isolating and purposeless.

Despite high education levels, Kerala faces alarmingly high rates of youth who are Not in Education, Employment, or Training (NEET). This disconnect between education and labour force participation signals a deep socioeconomic challenge. Based on qualitative interviews with a range of stakeholders in the state, JustJobs Network's Isha Gupta unpacks this paradox, pointing to a mismatch between youth aspirations and available opportunities.

JJN's Sabina Dewan writes on how technological advancement, trade shocks, climate change, and the energy transition are transforming how we live and work, faster than the ability of our education and skill systems to keep pace. She says urgent, comprehensive reforms — from effective implementation of the National Education Policy (NEP) to stronger industry partnerships — are necessary to improve our education and skills systems.

India is advancing social security for online gig workers, but this marks only a reactive step in addressing the evolving nature of informal work. JJN’s Renjini Rajagopalan writes for The Hindu highlighting the need for a more inclusive, universal social protection system to ensure no worker is left behind, especially as new worker categories emerge.

JJN’s Sabina Dewan writes on the urgent need to bridge the gap between growth and quality of jobs for the Indian working-age population. Labour market in India is failing to generate enough high-quality jobs for its large and growing population; at the same time employers struggle to find workers with the right skills for the job openings they have. Highlighting the growing extent of precarity in the nature of available work in the country, she makes the case for adopting a ground-up approach for job creation.

JJN’s Sabina Dewan writes on the expanding e-commerce ecosystem in India and its effect on MSMEs of the country. From the perspective of micro, small and medium enterprises, that are dealing with tech disruptions to stay in business and the 111 million jobs they support, she calls for appropriate and effective regulations to enable more inclusive growth of e-commerce.