On January 1, 2026, Deepinder Goyal, founder of Eternal – the company behind Zomato and Blinkit – came out all guns blazing on X (formerly Twitter). He said that, “unaffected by calls for strikes,” over 4.5 lakh delivery partners across Zomato and Blinkit delivered more than 75 lakh orders on December 31, 2025.

Goyal then rolled out a mix of selective data and WhatsApp University logic to push back against critics raising concerns about gig work in India, urging people not to “get swept up by narratives pushed by vested interests,” and positioning himself as a voice of reason amid what he suggested was motivated outrage by individuals who just want to stir up chaos for media mileage.

Let’s look at what Goyal said and try and deconstruct it point by point.

1) One of the main points Goyal made was: “If a system were fundamentally unfair, it would not consistently attract and retain so many people who choose to work within it.”

Of all the things that Goyal said this was by far the stupidest. Why? If what Goyal said was true, zamindari in India and feudalism in the West, wouldn’t have lasted as long as it did.

In a country like India with a lot of underemployment and youth unemployment, many individuals have no choice but to turn up for gig work. That does not make the system fair or tells us that all’s well.

Let me explain this in a language that Mr Goyal is perhaps likely to understand. The richest of India’s rich continue to live in The Camellias in Gurugram. As per Goyal’s logic that means there is no pollution in Gurugram, because if there was pollution, the rich – who can afford to – would have already moved out of Gurugram by now.

In a world where there is no pollution in Gurugram, the gig economy system is also fair. Sometimes one has to make a choice. That doesn’t really make the system fair. By trying to pass off desperation as consent, Goyal is being disingenuous.

2) Goyal urged us not to “get swept up by narratives pushed by vested interests”. But citizens questioning CEOs – who clearly do have vested interests – cannot themselves be dismissed as vested interests.

A CEO of a listed company has a duty to maximize profit over a period of time – which is the definition of a “vested interest”. A citizen questioning the system usually has no direct financial gain, unless they have invested in the stock of the company. 

The history of capitalism is littered with examples of business people exploiting their workers. The Nobel Prize winning economists Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson discuss the state of workers in the factories that were established at the dawn of the industrial revolution, first in the United Kingdom and then in other parts of the western world, in their book, Power and Progress – Our Thousand Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity: “Coal mines were vividly horrific, but they were not so unusual. Working conditions in cotton and other factories… were similarly draconian. And it was not just children who suffered. Workers did not see much, or any, improvement in their real incomes but ended up toiling longer hours and under harsher conditions than they used to before the age of the factories.”

Which is why governments got involved, regulation started to come in, and things gradually started to improve. Of course, citizens also started to get involved in trying to make the workplace a much better place.

3) Here are two things that Goyal said.

First: “In 2025, the average delivery partner [of] Zomato worked 38 days in the year and 7 hours per working day, reflecting true gig style participation rather than fixed schedules.”

Second: “Attrition percentage is 65% in a year, indicating that this is truly "gig" and not a permanent job for anyone.”

Does this reflect that working for Zomato and Blinkit, or any other quick commerce company, is really a gig? Or does it reflect something else? If the attrition rate is 65%, it’s hardly surprising that the average delivery partner works 38 days in a year. So, the average working days are low simply because ‘partners’ quit, and not just because they look at it as only a gig.

And why do they quit? Goyal wants us to believe that: “Most people do this for a few months in a year and move onto something more permanent.” There is no evidence of this other than Goyal saying it. It could equally mean that working as a delivery partner is simply not sustainable financially or even mentally, beyond a very short period of time.

The fact that Goyal and his company keep getting newer delivery partners despite this massive churn is a sad indication of the state of unemployment and underemployment in India. Also, in any other company, such a massive attrition rate would highlight ‘toxic’ working conditions, and be a huge reason for worry. In Goyal’s world, it’s just another day in paradise, and he doesn’t need to think twice.

4) Now, let’s get into some WhatsApp university level logic offered by Goyal. In one tweet – which I am summarising here – Goyal said that, for centuries, India’s inequality stayed hidden; the gig economy made it visible. Doorstep delivery forces consumers to confront workers’ exhaustion and low pay. The backlash reflects guilt, not just economics.

Either this was just a terrible AI prompt or Mr Goyal has access to very poor spin doctors.

This isn't an observation; it’s a shift of the blame. By framing the outrage as “moral discomfort,” Goyal neatly moves the spotlight away from his company onto the customer's psyche. He moves the spotlight away from corporate responsibility and structural reform, and onto the customer’s conscience – hoping to depoliticize a problem that requires regulation, not therapy.

To suggest that India’s inequality was "hidden" until Zomato arrived is breathtakingly arrogant. It assumes everyone lives in a soundproof bubble like The Camellias in Gurugram. Unless you spend your entire life inside gated communities, inequality in India isn’t a "revelation" – it’s the atmosphere. You see it at almost every busy traffic signal and every construction site.

5) This was by far the most hilarious thing that Goyal said: “If our delivery partners were the only ones breaking traffic rules, I would take the blame. A large number of Indians are always in a rush and breaking traffic rules. What's their "10 minute" incentive to do that? Nothing. We are impatient on the road as a society.”

If Goyal had said this in a West Delhi Residents’ Welfare Association WhatsApp group, he would have been the most popular man for that day, and other uncles meeting him on his evening walk would have told him: “Arre, Goyal saab kya likha aapne.”

This is another silly argument given that two wrongs don’t make a right. By equating an ordinary ruffian driving on the wrong side of the road or jumping a traffic light with Zomato and Blinkit riders breaking traffic rules, Goyal once again shifts the blame. What is a real problem – actively amplified by the incentives of the gig economy – is recast as a generic social failing, conveniently absolving the platforms that profit from it.

Indeed, blaming “society” for traffic violations committed by the delivery partners while Zomato and Blinkit, and other similar companies, make money from the speed of those violations is a classic case of what capitalists have always loved to do: privatising profits and socialising risks.

6) In another tweet, Goyal tries telling us that 10 minute delivery isn’t really a problem. He offers data: “After you place your order on Blinkit, it is picked and packed within 2.5 minutes. And then the rider drives an average of under 2 kms in about 8 minutes. That's an average of 15 kmph.”

Now, there are two arguments that I would like to offer here. First, my lived experience and that of many others I know, is totally different on this front. Whenever I step out of home, I see delivery partners driving on the wrong side of the road, changing lanes rapidly, breaking the traffic signal, and so on. Of course, anecdotal data is at the end of the day anecdotal, so, here’s the second point.

I guess the 15 kmph average speed doesn’t take into account the problem of the last mile. It’s a macro-metric that ignores micro-delays. Elevators, apartment security, parking, having to take the stairs in buildings which have no elevators, etc., are variables that the average speed doesn’t really take into account.

Further, as Goyal wrote, the delivery partners have no timer on their app, but even if there is no timer, the algorithmic pressure to complete more orders to make a living wage creates a “shadow timer” that forces riders to take risks.

Of course, a clear discussion on this point needs more data, which outsiders like me have no access to. But then it’s also worth remembering that Goyal said: “I agree. It should take less than 10 mins.” 

7) Goyal referred to the job that the delivery partners do as an “unskilled job”. Driving carefully while looking at a map and delivering products at the right address, may not exactly be rocket science, but it’s clearly not an unskilled job.

By calling it an unskilled job, Goyal questions the essential nature of the labour, which kept the company going during the pandemic. This labour also helped restaurants and cloud kitchens to continue operating. 

In fact, it’s worth mentioning here that all the technology being built by platform companies, like Eternal, aren’t of much use, if the gig workers don’t deliver the last mile – until robots become the order of the day, if and when they do. 

8) Goyal also talked about the fact that the concept of gig working is “one of the largest organised job creation engines in India”. This is true at a first order level. Indeed, large platform companies are creating gig working jobs. But that’s only one side of the business equation.

These jobs are being created to deliver products the companies are selling. Many of these products are being sold at discounts, sometimes huge discounts. Why are these discounts offered? To create the demand side of the equation. 

As Tim Wu writes The Age of Extraction – How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity: “Sometimes a platform [like Zomato or Blinkit or Uber is] may have trouble attracting enough members of one side of a transactional pair. Often it is buyers who are scarce… Sophisticated platform operators often try to subsidize the missing side, or even pay one group to show up… For years, Uber gave everyone rides that were effectively below cost so as to build up the network.” This is simply because the more buyers a platform can whip up, the stronger and more valuable its business model eventually becomes.

On the flip side, these discounts have an impact on others who are already in the same business. App-based cabs, for instance, have destroyed traditional taxi networks in many major cities.

Along similar lines, quick commerce companies may be destroying the mom and pop stores which have been fulfilling our grocery needs for decades. And that may be having an impact on the jobs front as well, with these stores having to fire employees in order to continue to be financially viable.

So, once we take second order effects into account, the job creation logic doesn’t really hold that true. Of course, on the whole, jobs may still be getting created, but one cannot say that with 100% confidence like Goyal did, unless more research and thinking happens on this front.

9) Goyal talked about companies reliant on the gig economy competing very brutally with each other. Take the quick commerce space in India. There are five main players: Blinkit, Instamart, Zepto, Flipkart Minutes, and BigBasket.

They compete with each other by offering discounts. The hope is that they have bigger pockets to keep subsidising their losses and outlast their competitors. This will ensure that one day they will have a monopoly on the market, and if not that, at least a duopoly (where there are two main players).

In this scenario, platform companies do not like the idea of hiring employees, or buying assets to carry out their business. The fact that these companies do not own many assets – physical or otherwise – yet generate revenues lies at the heart of their business models.

They are already running a high cost model and it does not make business sense for them to hire employees.

As Scott Galloway, a professor of marketing, writes in Post Corona—From Crisis to Opportunity: “The second an Uber car stops making the company a profit, it effectively disappears and costs the company nearly nothing… The model is akin to United Airlines telling its flight crews to bring their own 747 if they want to get a paycheck.”

Which is why such companies need to constantly keep making a distinction between gig workers – whom they euphemistically called partners – and employees. The trouble is that some basic logic shows us that the distinction isn’t really as crystal clear as they want us to believe.
In London, two drivers, James Farrar and Yaseen Aslam, took ride-hailing app Uber to court, arguing that they should be classified as workers under British law.

As Azeem Azhar writes in Exponential – How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It, the UK’s highest court unanimously rejected Uber’s arguments. It held that the drivers were not self-employed entrepreneurs in any meaningful sense, noting that Uber controlled key aspects of their work, including trip allocation, pricing, and communication between driver and passenger.

Or as Azhar writes: “Lord Leggatt, who wrote the ruling handed down by the Supreme Court, wrote: ‘The question… is not whether the system of control operated by Uber is in its commercial interests, but whether it places drivers in a position of subordination to Uber. It plainly does.’”
This logic applies to India’s delivery partners as well. In a way, this is a classic example of Orwellian doublespeak, which is the use of language designed to deceive by obscuring, distorting, or reversing the true meaning of words, making bad seem good or unpleasant seem tolerable.

10) One solid point that Goyal seems to have made is that “in 2025, average earnings per hour… for a delivery partner on Zomato were Rs 102”. He went on to elaborate that if someone were to work for 10 hours a day, for 26 days a month, this translates to Rs 26,500 in gross monthly earnings. After accounting for fuel and maintenance (around 20%), the net earnings for the partner will be around Rs 21,000/month.

To a casual observer, this sounds like a respectable entry-level wage in India. But the fact of the matter is that Goyal’s 20% deduction for "fuel and maintenance" is a convenient placeholder, but it ignores the true cost of capital.

A delivery partner isn't just a worker; they are a small-business owner providing the primary infrastructure (the vehicle and the smartphone). Once you factor in EMI interest on both the vehicle and the smartphone, annual insurance, data costs, and – most crucially – accelerated depreciation, that Rs 21,000 quickly starts to evaporate.

In fact, many Uber drivers in India, after a few years of paying the EMI, found out that the depreciation of the vehicle, which they hadn’t really thought about, turned out to be a very important factor in the overall scheme of things. It limited their earnings prospects as their vehicles weren’t in the best shape by the time the EMIs had been paid.

Further, the earnings of Rs 21,000 per month, seem to suggest that the gig economy is not as bad as it is being made out to be by a certain few. While some data is better than no data, averages don’t always tell us the real story. Or as the old joke goes: “A mathematician drowned crossing a river that was only 3 feet deep on average.”

If a few "super-users" work long days in high-density zones like the Golf-Course road in Gurugram or Andheri West in Mumbai, they pull the average up, masking the earnings of many other workers earning less. Which is why what we need is median income data across different cities verified by an external agency. 

Also, there is a specific irony in the rise of dark stores of quick commerce companies. For a rider, more dark stores = shorter distances = lower payouts per order. As distances drop, the fixed "effort" of finding a parking spot, navigating security, and climbing stairs remains the same, but the "per kilometre" pay may plummet. We are seeing a transition from “Gig Work” to “Micro-Gig Work,” where the effort-to-reward ratio is increasingly skewed in the company's favour. So, we also need the median payout per order data. 

11) Some people have compared the payout to gig workers to the monthly salary of those starting in information technology (IT) companies, and concluded that the gig workers on average are only making slightly lower money than IT freshers. So, where’s the problem?

This is false equivalence at best. A delivery partner's income is “capped” by the physical limits of time and human endurance. There is no “Senior Delivery Partner” role which comes with a pay hike.

In fact, as Goyal asked regarding delivery partners: “Career progression for an unskilled job?” In comparison, the IT freshers through upskilling and annual appraisals, and/or by changing jobs, can at least hope to increase their incomes.

Further, what is passed off as the delivery partner’s income, should actually be termed as their gross sales. An IT employee is provided with the “tools of production” (laptop, office, electricity, internet). A gig worker must bring their own tools. That is another essential difference.

Also, people working in IT get paid leave. In the gig economy, No Work = No Income. Now, this is not to say that IT freshers are doing very well for themselves, but this isn’t a fair comparison to begin with.

To conclude, Deepinder Goyal’s defence of the gig economy follows a familiar corporate script: selective statistics, convenient averages, and a steady shifting of responsibility – from platform to partner, from company to consumer, and finally to society itself.

By continuing to live in The Camellias, one might hallucinate that the air in Gurugram is clean. But anyone who has looked out of their window knows that it isn’t, and is choking those on the street below.

India’s gig economy undoubtedly delivers speed, scale, and convenience. But it also systematically transfers risk – unstable incomes, capital costs, safety hazards, and job insecurity – onto workers with the least bargaining power.

History is unambiguous on this point. From factories in industrial England to the cotton plantations of the US to platform companies of today, markets and capitalists rarely correct power imbalances on their own. They require scrutiny, regulation, and pressure from outside their system.

Treating desperation as choice and churn as flexibility may work in investor presentation decks, but it does not make the system fair. The gig economy’s real innovation is not efficiency, but how elegantly it turns human insecurity into a feature rather than a bug.

The real question is not whether the gig economy creates work, but whether it creates work that is economically viable once risk, costs, and churn, are honestly accounted for. That’s the long story cut very long. 

Vivek Kaul is an economic commentator and a writer. 

Complaining about the media is easy. Why not do something to make it better? Support independent media and subscribe to Newslaundry today.