The Summer I Worked at Burger King

What the Gig Economy Debate in India Is Missing

Almost twenty-five years ago, I went to the United States to study. I was the first person in my extended family to do so. In the run-up to the departure, both sides of my family came to see me off! The deal I had with my parents was that they would cover the first semester’s tuition (which I needed to apply for the visa) and then I would be on my own. My parents doubted my ability to tough it out and were not at all rich enough to take on that kind of commitment - but after protracted sulking (me) and my unsuccessful trips to all the local banks for a loan without collateral, my parents gave in.

That began my stint in the American fast-food industry, first in the on-campus restaurants. And then the summer where I worked full-time at Burger King. Burger King had a drive-through with a timer. As soon as a car arrived, the clock began counting down. Orders had to be completed within two or three minutes. I no longer remember the exact number, but I remember the sound. If you crossed the limit, a loud buzzer would go off. On paper, the time sounds manageable. How long does it take to assemble a burger, fries and a coke? But, in practice, many small things could and did go wrong. There might not be enough fries and you would need to put in a new batch. A customer might want a modification. One evening, many things went wrong at once. The buzzer went off, and kept buzzing while I rushed around in panic.

At the time, I was too young to question how absurd this was. But more than two decades later, I still remember it. That sense of induced urgency, of manufactured crisis. This is what today’s ten-minute delivery culture reminds me of. Speed becomes a moral imperative even when nothing essential is at stake. So I understand and support the opposition to the ten-minute delivery model.

But other than that, I am unclear on how exactly to think about the gig economy. I have a set of impulses but I haven’t been able to interrogate them fully to develop a public opinion about it. Workers mobilising for better working conditions are not answerable for the larger political economy context. In any direct confrontation between gig workers and platforms, I side with the workers. But while workers are not obligated to consider issues related to macroeconomic structure, business viability, or long-term growth, people within the public policy space are. And it is here that I struggle. This post is an attempt to work through some of the open issues.

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India has a huge labour surplus problem. Labour precarity is structural and macroeconomic. It flows from the failure to generate large numbers of stable, moderately productive jobs. Gig work is one expression of that failure - not its cause. Platform work did not invent these conditions. It reorganised them, rendered them legible through apps and algorithms, and scaled them rapidly. That visibility - and its interface with the urban middle class - is politically powerful in ways construction work or street vending are not.

This visibility explains why the debate generates so much heat. But it also explains why it feels unsatisfying - we’re arguing about a symptom while avoiding the disease. India leapfrogged over manufacturing straight into services. We have similarly leapfrogged into a preoccupation with labour policy without actually formalising our economy.

This leapfrogging was not accidental. India and China started the 1980s at similar income levels. China bet on manufacturing; India didn’t. The post-1991 reforms liberalised services and capital markets while leaving the constraints on manufacturing largely untouched. The constituencies that benefited from skill-intensive services were also the constituencies that mattered politically. Today, our policy discourse has adopted a paradigm which suits our large policy elite.

We tend to have intense ad-hoc arguments about visible forms of precarity while avoiding the deeper question of how an economy generates opportunity at scale. A perfectly regulated gig economy would still not solve the structural problem. But the nature of these debates risk obscuring the larger developmental challenge.

India has the largest youth population in the world. We have ONE urgent question: What is the development paradigm that will mainstream this youth bulge into productive and meaningful work?

For a young country at India’s income level, the urgent political imperative is growth that is both broad-based and employment-intensive. However, the absence of serious debate on growth and governance has cornered our discourse. Consequently, our debates default either to rhetoric or ideological priors. On one side, there is a troubling valorisation of self-dealing privilege. On the other, an important but insufficient preoccupation with social security. Neither addresses the central question.

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Loss-making companies that rely on deep venture capital funds to drive small competitors out of business raise serious concerns about predatory behaviour and should be regulated instead of valorised. That this is enabled by extreme concentrations of capital points to how inequality converts into political power. It is also difficult to reconcile claims of financial fragility with the extraordinary personal wealth of promoters. If the argument is that companies cannot afford to treat workers better, then it is reasonable to ask why austerity flows only downward. Genuine leadership, in every other context, is expected to absorb risk first.

At the same time, dignity at work is not only about wages and safety. It is also about having a place in the economic story of the country. Yet, we talk far more about protection than about aspiration.

Let me return again to my time in the US. The first one and a half years were not pleasant. I worked full-time, seven days a week for six or seven dollars an hour in a bunch of jobs. I briefly tried waitressing too but I was horrible at it - I talked back to inappropriate customers and mixed up orders. Then the restaurant shut down (unrelated).

But there were meaningful differences. First, my family functioned as an absolute backstop. Once, I wanted to participate in a drug trial because it paid hundreds of dollars for what seemed like very little work. Take some tested drugs and give some blood. I casually mentioned it to my sister who told my parents. And my family sitting thousands of miles away in India lost their mind in the way only Indian families can to shut it down.

It was a time of 0% APR credit cards and I cycled through a few, transferring balances - not a solution, but a buffer that bought time. Most importantly, I was already in college on a scholarship. Once when there was some increase in tuition fees, I went to meet the Dean to explain my situation. She covered the difference by crafting a Dean’s scholarship because despite all of America’s grave problems, struggle and hard work is socially valued. Finally, my school had a program where I could study one semester and work one semester, and so after a year and a half, I graduated to properly paid jobs.

The same shit jobs can carry radically different meanings depending on whether there are exits, backstops, and time horizons. This is the tragedy of India. Hard work is not guaranteed to lead anywhere. Effort often has no social premium - it is treated as baseline expectation rather than something that merits recognition or institutional response. The most politically dangerous form of precarity is not difficult work. It is unbounded, uninsured, and inescapable work with no visible exit or assurance.

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What would a genuine debate on growth actually look like?

It would begin by asking uncomfortable questions about value creation rather than assuming it. Not every firm that scales is innovative. Not every platform that expands is creating new work. Some reorganise existing labour, displace informal competitors, or extract rents through control over data, logistics, or capital. A serious growth debate would distinguish between firms that create new productive capacity and those that merely aggregate more efficiently for the already affluent. That distinction matters because only the former can anchor durable employment at scale.

Such a debate would also force us to confront the role of the state. Growth depends on the state’s ability to deliver public goods and whether the state can govern land, labour, and logistics without paralysis or arbitrariness. It depends on whether we inculcate the culture and conditions for innovation and risk-taking.

This is precisely where we resist engagement. One response to weak state capacity has been excessive centralisation - concentrating decision-making in the hope that authority can substitute for institutions. Another has been excessive bureaucratisation - multiplying rules and procedures that diffuse responsibility while preserving control. Both avoid the harder task of building accountable, decentralised, and competent governance.

A growth debate grounded in governance would be politically demanding. It would expose how much of India’s inequality is reproduced not only by markets but by the state’s uneven ability to enforce rules, resolve disputes, and deliver public goods. It would require shifting attention away from moral outrage toward the slow work of institutional reform and political accountability. And it would force a reckoning with an elite that has too often favoured extraction over nation-building.

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For me, the period of drudgery and hard work had a very clearly defined end. I didn’t enjoy it but it didn’t break my spirit or make me angry. None of the avenues were guaranteed. But they existed - discoverable, accessible, stackable. That systemic multiplicity made my precarity finite, with visible exits. The system itself signalled that effort mattered, and that recognition gave dignity. That time also had lasting value: it gave me empathy for India’s striving young that little else would have.

Most young Indians have none of these. They have hard work without guarantees, discipline without payoff, aspiration without support, and struggle without dignity.

That is the problem we are not debating. Until we do, we will continue to oscillate between moral rhetoric and technocratic fixes, neither of which can deliver what India’s youth actually need: a credible sense that effort leads somewhere and a place in the national growth story.