Zwigato: The gig worker's life, struggle enters Bollywood spotlight

Deepening inequality makes working-class lives increasingly precarious in India

About halfway through the Hindi film ‘Zwigato’ (2022), directed by Nandita Das, its protagonist Manas Singh Mahto (Kapil Sharma) takes a lunch break. Manas is a gig worker with the fictional food-delivery app Zwigato, an obvious play on the names of India’s two leading apps, Swiggy and Zomato. He is sitting with a few friends who are members of a labour union. They start discussing the benefits and challenges of gig work. “You are completely free,” says one, praising the apps. “You can go online when you want.” Another demurs: “The apps are only middlemen. They don’t make the food, nor deliver it.”

 

 

Manas’s lunch is interrupted as his cell phone starts buzzing with a new delivery request. “It is still slavery,” he says, quickly shutting his tiffin box, “only the boss is invisible.” As he gets on his bike and is about to ride away, he catches a glimpse of one of the posters his friend is painting. The slogan reads: “He is a worker, so he is helpless!” Manas muses: “Maybe he is helpless, and so he is a worker.” Directed by Nandita Das, ‘Zwigato’ is a pensive narrative of the increasingly precarious lives of India’s vast — and often invisible — working class.

 

The smog of invisibility that shrouds working lives in India was briefly lifted on 31 December 2025, when nearly 200,000 gig workers went on a day-long strike. Their demands included social security, health insurance and pension, as well as stopping the use of automated systems by platforms such as Zomato, Swiggy, Blinkit and Zepto to penalise them. They also demanded an immediate ban on the marketing strategy of delivering groceries within 10 minutes in a 3-km radius. In response, the central government reportedly asked the platforms to drop the controversial “10-minute delivery promise” earlier this week.

 

The gig economy in India has expanded significantly over the past decade. It is expected to contribute 1.25 per cent to the Indian economy by 2030. The number of people employed by the gig economy is expected to rise to 23.5 million by the end of this decade from 7.7 million in 2022, according to a study by the government think tank NITI Aayog. This growth is fuelled, in part, by a stagnation in the job market. “India’s recent job market trends are rather disappointing, with rising unemployment and a decline in new jobs,” writes economist Balwant Singh Mehta, adding: “(T)he gig economy is fast emerging as a respite.”

 

This respite, however, comes with strings attached. In a 2023 paper, economists Ajeet Kumar Pankaj and Manish K. Jha point out that gig workers often go through “long working hours, low wages, fear of losing their jobs and insecurity”, resulting in precarity. Further, “gig workers from poor socio-economic backgrounds often experience discrimination and exclusion because of their social positioning,” write Pankaj and Jha. They cite media reports of food- and grocery-delivery workers not being allowed to use lifts of residents in high rises, and the refusal of clients to accept food from Dalit or Muslim workers. “The precarious situation… (is) not merely produced by state practice but the lack of an empathetic approach of society,” write Pankaj and Jha.  

 

‘Zwigato’ empathetically shows the increasing precarity of Manas and his wife, Pratima (Shahana Goswami). For every delivery, Manas gets a pittance of Rs 15. The company for which he works, however, is worth billions of dollars. (The market capitalisation of Swiggy is reportedly $11 billion, and Zomato around $28 billion.) Before being pushed into gig work, Manas was a factory floor manager but lost his job — possibly due to the COVID-19 pandemic. His earnings are not enough to cover his family's expenses, so Pratima also works as a cleaner at a shopping mall.

 

Despite his increasingly desperate attempt to keep working, the app arbitrarily blocks Manas’s ID, rendering him unemployed. Having portrayed the precarity of gig workers' lives, however, the film refuses to push the envelope. The fledgling attempts at unionisation by the workers fail. Manas’s anger remains suppressed, habituated as he is, in his own words, to being a “good boy”. A climactic confrontation with a senior executive of the company, played by actress Sayani Gupta, is quite anticlimactic. After a brief altercation, the executive dismisses Manas. For the behemoth of the company, he is simply a disposable worker who has been squeezed out.  

 

By refusing to confront the whole, brutal tragedy ensconced in the narrative, the film ends up being a middle-class view of working-class lives. Watching the film right after the recent mobilisation by gig workers alerts one to the fault line at the heart of India’s digital economy. The muted ending offers no closure, but seems to echo a disquieting reality: Precarity rarely erupts into catharsis; it simply endures.

 

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Uttaran Das Gupta is an independent writer and journalist