Gig Economy Worker Survey and Report

Added Jul 2026 3 design docs

Ask any college student how a food delivery app works and they will describe the customer side perfectly: the map, the countdown timer, the tip screen. Almost nobody can describe the other side, where a rider decides whether a 3.2 km trip paying ₹34 is worth the petrol, the twelve minutes of unpaid waiting outside a restaurant and the risk of a late-delivery penalty. Platform work has quietly become one of the largest sources of urban employment for young Indians, yet it fits into none of the neat categories a labour economics textbook offers, because there is no fixed wage, no fixed shift and no employer who absorbs the cost of the vehicle.

The intern measures that other side for one city. A structured questionnaire built in google-forms is administered face to face to at least 60 workers across food delivery, ride-hailing and quick commerce, six longer conversations add texture, and an earnings model in google-sheets converts gross app payouts into effective hourly earnings after fuel, EMI, maintenance, mobile data and unpaid waiting time. The evidence becomes a 14-16 page findings report, a 6-8 page policy brief carrying three costed recommendations, and a set of anonymised quote cards designed in canva.

Completing the project takes the intern through the full arc of applied labour economics: ethical survey design with informed consent, face-to-face fieldwork with a hard-to-reach population, cost-of-service modelling, percentile analysis instead of lazy averages, and the discipline of turning numbers into recommendations that name an owner and a price. Research firms, policy think tanks and development organisations hire precisely for this sequence, and a public repository of original primary evidence is far more persuasive at an interview than a certificate alone.

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