In the labyrinthine lanes of Old Delhi, a new service has emerged that feels both remarkably modern and achingly old. A startup is now offering, for a few rupees, someone to carry your shopping bags from the market to your car. It sounds like a convenience for the harried middle class. But for those of us who watch the economy from the kitchen table up, it raises a more unsettling question: is this genuine opportunity, or a sign of how desperate the labour market has become?
The app-based model is simple. You hire a 'bagger' by the hour, and they haul your vegetables, your clothes, your plastic packages of sundry goods. The company promises dignity and safety, assigning bright vests and a digital payment system. The workers, mostly young men from nearby villages, earn a small wage per gig. For a city like Delhi, where every pavement is a marketplace and every trip to the bazaar is a test of endurance, it might seem like a logical innovation.
But let's look at the numbers. A bagger earns roughly 200 to 300 rupees for a few hours of work. That is about £2 to £3. In a city where a plate of chole bhature costs 80 rupees and bus fare eats up another 20, this is not a living wage. It is a supplement, a stopgap, a notch above begging. The startup itself is a gig economy platform, with no promise of a regular shift or a guaranteed income. The workers are 'partners,' not employees. They have no right to sick pay, no pension, no protection if they twist an ankle on a broken pavement.
I spoke to Ramesh, a 22-year-old from Bihar who has been carrying bags for three weeks. He said he left his village because the monsoon failed and his family's small plot of land yielded nothing. In Delhi, he sleeps on a pavement near the market with five other men. Carrying bags, he said, is better than nothing. He smiled when he said it. But there was no joy in his eyes. He knows that every bag he carries is a reminder that the economy has no place for him except as a beast of burden.
The company's founder argues that they are formalising an informal system. After all, coolies and porters have existed for centuries. But those workers, at least, had a union, a fixed spot at the railway station, a sense of belonging to a trade. This new model atomises labour. It makes every transaction a one-off, every worker a freelancer with no collective power. The Delhi gig is a microcosm of a global trend: the casualisation of labour under the guise of flexibility.
Will it work? From a business perspective, probably yes. The middle class in India is growing, and its appetite for convenience is insatiable. The app will likely attract venture capital, expand to other cities, and maybe even turn a profit. But for the workers, the arithmetic is brutal. The real cost of this service is not the few rupees the customer pays. It is the erosion of any hope of a stable job, of a career, of upward mobility.
This is the new face of the informal economy: tech-enabled, app-based, and utterly precarious. It is not just in Delhi. In London, we have our own gig economy, with delivery riders and zero-hour contract workers. The details change, but the story is the same. A reserve army of labour, desperate for any income, is being fed into a system that extracts their time and energy with no promise of a future.
I am not opposed to innovation. But I am opposed to the pretence that this is empowerment. Carrying bags is honest work. But it is not a ladder. It is a stool. It gives you just enough height to stay above the floodwater, but not enough to climb out. Until we start talking about wages that can actually fund a life, about collective bargaining rights for app workers, about the kind of economy that invests in people rather than just convenience, then stories like this one are not innovations. They are indictments.
The sun sets over the spice market. Ramesh picks up another load of shopping. The customer barely looks at him. The transaction is complete. The economy moves on. And somewhere, in a boardroom or a blog, a founder celebrates a breakthrough. But the real breakthrough would be an economy where Ramesh does not have to carry bags for strangers to survive. That is the story we need to be writing.
