Role of Gig Economy in Generating Urban Employment- A Study on the City of Hyderabad

Abstract

The dawn of new technology has unleashed enormous opportunities for urban habitats in the form of freelancing job contracts ranging from unskilled to skilled works and created a new layer of economic development which is informally referred to as the gig economy. The freelancing works are not merely confined to the food and grocery delivery system; rather they are spread to the extent of handling international software projects generating lucrative profits for the workforce, which would otherwise depend upon the nominal salaries to make the living. But the flip side of gig economy lies in the feeble welfare of the workforce, lax regulation, and brevity of job contracts, which altogether forges a strong question of whether the gig economy carries the load of generating urban employment. The present work attempts to answer this question by studying the role of gig economy in generating urban employment in the city of Hyderabad, which is the fifth largest urban arcade of India in terms of population that accommodates both skilled and unskilled gig workers in a sizable proportion. This paper also ventures to analyze the perceptions of gig workers in order to understand the pros and cons of the gig economy in making it a prop of long-run employment source in urban areas.