Dr. Vani Aggarwal, Senior Assistant Professor, Soil School of Business Design
Aditi Jha, PGDM student, SOIL School of Business Design
Over 7 lakh gig workers are registered across India — but most of them live in just a handful of states. Here is what the numbers say, and why it matters.
India has a huge and growing army of gig workers — people who drive cabs, deliver food, build houses, do domestic work, and take on short-term jobs every day. These workers do not have a fixed employer. They pick up work when it comes and move on when it ends. The government has now started counting them. According to official data collected under the Building and Other Construction Workers Act, there are at least 7,29,477 registered gig workers across the country. But here is the surprise: they are not spread evenly across India. Almost all of them live in a few specific states.
West Bengal sits at the top — by a wide margin
If you look at the numbers, one state stands far above the rest. West Bengal has 2,20,128 registered gig workers — that is 30 out of every 100 gig workers in the entire country. Nearly one in three. This is not a small lead. The next state on the list, Uttar Pradesh, has 1,33,976 gig workers. After that comes Bihar with 68,720, Odisha with 52,174, and Jharkhand with 45,798.
Gig worker registrations by state — top 10
Together, just five states — West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Odisha, and Jharkhand — account for 71 per cent of all gig registrations in India. That means the rest of the country — 32 other states and Union Territories — shares only 29 per cent of the total. This is a very unequal picture.
Why are gig workers concentrated in these states?
The answer is not hard to find. These five states share a few common features. They all have very large populations. They all have high levels of poverty and unemployment. And they all have limited access to factory jobs, government jobs, or steady private sector work. When there are few formal jobs available, people take whatever work they can get. Gig work — whether it is construction labour, carrying loads, domestic help, or delivery — fills that gap.
West Bengal, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Odisha, and Jharkhand are also states that send large numbers of migrant workers to other parts of India. Many of these migrants register under labour welfare schemes when they return home or when they find work near their home districts. The high registration numbers in these states reflect not just local gig work, but also a workforce that moves around the country in search of daily income.
Which states are growing fastest?
Looking at which states added the most new gig workers recently tells a different story. The fastest-growing states are not the biggest ones. Dadra and Nagar Haveli, a small Union Territory, recorded a 7 per cent growth rate — the highest in the country. Sikkim also came in at 7 per cent. Delhi recorded 6 per cent growth, and Haryana came in at 5 per cent.
Gig worker registration growth rate — fastest-growing states
This matters because it shows a shift. Gig work is no longer only a rural or eastern India story. Cities like Delhi and urban states like Haryana are pulling in more gig workers, driven by food delivery, logistics, cab services, and construction activity. As India’s cities grow, gig work in urban areas is growing with them.
At the other end of the scale, some states and Union Territories have almost no registered gig workers at all. Ladakh has just 2 registered workers. Several northeastern states — Nagaland, Mizoram, Tripura — have fewer than 100 each. These are not states without workers. They are states where registration systems have not reached, where awareness is low, or where the nature of local work does not fit the existing registration framework. A daily-wage farm worker in Manipur and a food delivery rider in Bengaluru are both gig workers in practice, but only one of them is likely to be counted.
The median number of gig registrations per state is 4,974 — but the average is 20,842. That gap tells you everything. A small number of very large states are pulling the average up. Most states have tiny numbers. India’s gig economy, as the data stands today, is essentially a few eastern states carrying the weight of the whole country.
What this means for workers — and policy
The state-wise picture is not just a counting exercise. It has real consequences for real people. Under India’s new social security rules, workers need to be registered to receive benefits like accident insurance and health cover. But if registration is concentrated in a handful of states, then crores of gig workers elsewhere are invisible to the system. They work, they contribute to the economy, but they get nothing back.
The national average gig growth rate is just 1.77 per cent. That is not explosive growth — it is slow, uneven, and patchy. For a workforce that NITI Aayog projects will cross 2.3 crore workers by 2029–30, the registration system is not keeping up. The data shows where the workers are. The harder question — whether India’s policies will reach them — is still waiting for an answer.
