Why domestic gig workers in India are unhappy despite the better pay

In October, a video posted on the filmmaker Farah Khan’s YouTube page received more than 150,000 likes.

In it, Khan and her cook Dilip are frustrated on finding out that Khan’s domestic worker Pushpa has not cleaned a filthy kitchen, and is instead on her way out to catch a flight to visit her family. Dilip suggests that Khan try Snabbit, a phone application that offers domestic services within ten minutes.

Soon, a “Snabbit expert”, a worker dressed in a hot pink t-shirt and black joggers, walks into the kitchen, sets to work and leaves it gleaming. Elated by the efficient service, Khan calls up Pushpa and tells her not to return home, because she now has Snabbit.

As Dilip listens along and laughs, Khan cautions him: “Don’t laugh too much, Snabbit will soon introduce cooks.”

As the sun rises in Mumbai, its public parks start filling up with early morning walkers and joggers. Over the past year, however, it has also become common in these spaces to see groups of women wearing pink or leaf green t-shirts, with black pants. Unlike those out to exercise, these women mostly sit on park benches, looking expectantly at their phones .

These are workers with the kind of company that Khan’s video was advertising, offering domestic services in the gig economy.

The leading companies in this sector are Snabbit and Pronto. Urban Company has also launched a domestic services vertical called Insta Help. These services began to be launched around late 2024, and the companies have thus far primarily focused their efforts in India’s metro cities.

While previous attempts at providing similar services by other companies about a decade ago had failed, Snabbit and Pronto appear to have found some initial success.

Snabbit was founded in 2024 by Aayush Agarwal, and is currently valued at $180 million. So far, the company has raised more than $55 million in funds from investors. While it is focused for now on domestic workers, Agarwal said in an interview to Forbes India that the company aims to expand to “drivers, cooks and doctors – anything that is high frequency”.

Pronto was also started in 2024, by 23-year-old Anjali Sardana. As of December 2025, it was valued at $100 million, and had raised more than $13 million in investments. Insta Help’s parent company, Urban Company, meanwhile, has been valued at $3 billion.

While the success stories of these companies make headlines, activists and researchers have raised concerns about this burgeoning sector.

In one essay, researchers Amruta SN and Shalaka noted that domestic work in general in India was inherently informal, and lacked legal frameworks that ensured workers “minimum wages, safe working conditions, or access to social security”.

Indeed, activists and domestic workers have struggled for decades to obtain legal safeguards for workers. The journalist Shreya Raman noted in BehanBox that the first phase of this struggle began as early as 1959, but that it has been largely unsuccessful due to the “lack of political will and conflict of interests”.

Many fear that the new platforms will only duplicate the deep-rooted problems in the employment and treatment of domestic workers.

To understand workers’ perspectives on the new platforms, Scroll interviewed around 35 women who work with Snabbit, Insta Help and Pronto in Mumbai’s suburbs, including Andheri, Chembur, Goregaon, Malad and Kandivali.

Most workers said they were happy with their pay, but some complained of having to work long hours, without adequate breaks. Some also noted that they were often forced to overwork and unable to take time off to recover from illnesses. Many said they faced mistreatment by customers and did not find adequate redressal systems in the companies. (All the workers who spoke to Scroll for this story have been anonymised to protect their privacy.)

Chitra Gosavi, a lawyer and member of the National Domestic Workers Movement, spelled out some of the workers’ key concerns. “These are profit-making apps,” she said. “They might pay workers well now, but what will the long terms effects be on the sector? What rules and regulations do these companies follow? Are their workers defined as domestic workers or gig workers?”

She added, “These apps have a lot of power and there is no monitoring mechanism for them yet. They can do whatever they want with workers – underpay them, undermine their safety, and even kick them out arbitrarily.”

All three apps claim to empower the women workers, and refer to them as “experts” or “partners”, rather than “maids” or even “domestic workers”. They also claim that they seek to “modernise” or “revolutionise” the domestic work industry.

But the researcher Ambika Tandon, who studies gig work and the digital economy, noted that these apps are “intermediaries who are coming into the industry to commodify domestic work”.

She added, “Beyond that, they are not bringing any duty of care to their workers.”

Scroll emailed all three companies, seeking responses to criticisms from workers, activists and experts about their functioning. As of the time of publishing, none had responded.

This story is part of Common Ground, our in-depth and investigative reporting project. Sign up here to get the stories in your inbox soon after they are published.

Workers to whom Scroll spoke had held a variety of jobs before signing up with the new platforms. Among them were former office assistants, shopping assistants and security guards.

The workers said they had joined the platforms because they received better pay on them. With “chutta kaam”, the term for the informal domestic work system, the rates are often fixed by residents of housing societies in consultation with each other “and they remain the same for years”, said Beena, a Snabbit worker whom I met along with around a dozen other workers, in a park in Kandivali.

The platforms give workers some choice in terms of the number of daily hours they want to sign up for, and pay them a monthly sum according to the number of jobs they complete.

While Snabbit workers said they earn up to Rs 22,000 for eight hours of work and up to Rs 40,000 for 12 hours of work, Insta Help workers said they earn around Rs 21,000 for eight hours of work and around Rs 25,000 for 11 hours of work. Meanwhile, those signed with Pronto said they earn up to Rs 24,000 for eight hours of work and up to Rs 32,000 for 12 hours of work. They also earn bonuses for following certain practices, such as logging in to work early, arriving at customers’ houses before time and working overtime.

But Tandon noted that quick commerce companies usually offer high pay to workers and low prices to customers when they start services, only to reduce them later.

She outlined the pattern that many companies, such as the delivery platforms Blinkit and Zepto, follow. At first, she said, they “will give you massive discounts that your kirana store can’t offer, and using that they will build customers”. Once they established a “solid customer base”, she noted, “they will increase prices”.

For gig workers, meanwhile, “as soon as the market stabilises their income will drop, and at that time you could be in debt”. Such a decline in earnings was widely reported, for instance, among drivers registered with cab-hailing apps after an initial period in which they received higher incomes.

Indeed, some workers on the domestic work apps, particularly those who had been registered with them for a relatively longer period, said they had begun noticing that changes were being made to payment models.

Four Pronto workers, for instance, noted that till November, workers who joined the company were paid Rs 28,000 monthly for eight hours of work a day, but that after that month, the amount was changed to Rs 24,000 for new workers.

Some workers also said that the companies had begun imposing stringent penalties on them, which ate into their earnings. For instance, they said, if they do not complete all the bookings they receive during their stipulated work hours, or cancel any, the money they earn reduces.

Further, workers said that in some neighbourhoods, Insta Help has begun penalising them if they arrived late for a booking. If they were late more than three times in one month, they added, then their rating on the app would drop and money would be deducted from their monthly pay.

Researchers have also raised concerns about the fact that gig-work platforms in general do not provide transparent information to their workers. One paper argued that they practice “systemic and deliberate information asymmetry”, which leaves workers uncertain about their working terms, and payment conditions. This, it noted, gives rise to a regime of opacity, randomness, and unfairness, leading to chronic anxiety and insecurity among workers”.

Tandon echoed this argument. She noted that the platform’s algorithms were designed to ensure that workers would be available to meet a fluctuating demand from users.

She added, “For the workers, what that means is there is very little predictability or ability to anticipate what the pay might be. Or post facto, to even understand how they are being paid.”

Workers also struggled with a lack of clarity about the time off they were entitled to. In an interview, Agarwal explained that among the problems that Snabbit sought to address pertained to employers’ complaints that domestic workers took frequent, abrupt days off. “Absenteeism and unreliability of domestic workers was a universal pain point” in households across the country, he said.

By providing workers on-demand, he added, Snabbit had “unlocked a new category of urban convenience”.

For workers, however, the system is far from convenient. Many seemed confused about how many days of leave they were entitled to and if these days were paid or unpaid. Some spoke of being constantly exhausted by the effort it took to ensure that the algorithm did not penalise them.

Workers with more experience of the platform rules explained that they did not receive paid leave at all. “See, we are allowed to take four leaves in a month, but on those days, we don’t earn any money through bookings and incentives,” said Beena. “So, it is actually unpaid leave.”

As a result, many take as few days off as they can. “For most workers, every rupee counts, so we try to earn as much as possible and don’t take leaves if we can help it,” Beena said.

Even though their days off are unpaid leave, workers explained, the platforms imposed limits on how many such days they could log. Snabbit workers said they were allowed to take four days of leave in a month. Similarly, Pronto and Insta Help noted that they could take two days of leave in a month. If they took any more days off, apart from losing earnings, all three platforms sometimes imposed penalties on them, workers said.

These were not the only restrictions that the platforms imposed on leave: workers with all three platforms said they were also barred from taking leave on weekends. They said if they did take any weekend days off, not only did they not earn money that day, the companies also imposed steep fines on them. Snabbit workers claimed the company cuts around Rs 1,000 per day if they take a weekend day off, while Insta Help workers said the company fines them two days of pay – around Rs 2,000 – for every weekend day they take off.

“Saturdays and Sundays are our two busiest days, we receive the maximum number of bookings on those days,” said Smita, a Snabbit worker in Andheri, who has been with the company for a year. “So, it is compulsory to work on those days and we cannot take leave then.”

Workers at all three companies also said they were not allowed to take leaves at the last minute for emergencies. “If we want to take leave the next day, we have to inform our team leaders before 12 am that night, otherwise we get penalised,” said Beena. Insta Help workers claimed that they were penalised a full day’s pay even if they worked half their shift and then logged out because of an emergency.

The companies did not respond to Scroll’s queries pertaining to their leave policies.

Within each workday, too, workers struggled to take regular breaks, because the platforms dictate their work hours. As a result, many noted, for instance, they could not keep to regular mealtimes. “The app usually tells us to take a lunch break between 1 pm-3 pm. But it can also be arbitrary, sometimes it’ll tell us to go on break at 11 am, and then keep us working all afternoon,” said Rita, who works for Snabbit in Kandivali. “On many days, I only get to eat around 4 or 5 in the evening. How can one keep working after being hungry for so long?”

In mid-January, I booked the services of a Pronto worker in a northern Mumbai suburb, to gain a better understanding of how the system worked. After the worker’s service period was completed, I offered her a cup of tea. As she sat sipping her tea, she received a call – the ensuing conversation left her visibly frustrated. “That was my supervisor asking why I haven’t left your place yet,” she said. “Once our booking ends, we have to cross a distance of 50 metres away from the customer’s place within five minutes. If we don’t, we get calls like this. They won’t let us drink tea in peace.”

Kamla, a worker with one platform, recounted a particularly harsh instance of how the platforms can push workers to work unreasonable, stressful hours. The incident occurred just after she had to take a few days’ break from work to care for her husband, who had suffered a heart attack and been hospitalised.

On the day she returned, Kamla received a booking for four hours. “There was a wedding-related function going on and they had a lot of work for me,” she said. “Once I finished four hours, they booked me for another four.”

Kamla had started work at 12 in the afternoon and finally got a break around 8 pm in the evening. “We are entitled to half an hour for a lunch break, which I only got in the evening, so I went to the park and bought some food to eat,” she recounted. “I still had one hour of duty left, in which I could receive a booking, but I was so tired I forgot to check my phone.”

After around 45 minutes, Kamla received an angry call from her team leader, who she said yelled at her for extending her break and not attending to another booking she had received. “He was very rude to me, and I felt very upset, so I decided to leave the company,” she said.

Workers explained that enrolling with the platforms also leaves them struggling to find time to fulfil other responsibilities, such as caring for their families.

Their experience is echoed in research on the sector. In 2023, the organisation Fairwork published a report titled “Gender and Platform Work”, comprising research on platform work across 38 countries. It noted that women on these platforms typically bore a “double burden” – a term used by feminist scholars to denote the fact that working women also typically perform household work, such as cleaning, laundry and cooking.

The report noted that in setting up their working terms, platforms typically “operate on the assumption that the worker is an independent, efficient, mobile, digitally engaged man without family responsibilities and other considerations”. Thus, it noted, “Such a worker is assumed to be solely working to maximise their short-term gains and can easily be incentivised to act in a predictable manner.”

As a result, “those women who work in the platform economy often have to make trade-offs between earning a living and their caregiving responsibilities”, it observed.

In some instances, workers are left unable to look after ailing family members. Anupama, a young mother who currently works for Snabbit in Goregaon, worked for Insta Help from August to October last year. When her child fell seriously ill in mid-October, she had to stay home to nurse him. While she informed Insta Help about her situation, she said, the company did not respond.

Around two weeks later, when she was ready to return to work, she discovered that her account had been blocked. Her attempts to reason with her supervisors proved futile. “I told them that as a mother, I had no choice but to nurse my child back to health,” she said. “But they weren’t sympathetic to me, they told me that the company was as important to them as my child was to me.”

The platform did not respond to a query from Scroll about this incident.

Workers also struggle with their own health troubles. Aditi, a platform worker in her early-twenties in Kandivali, said she was hospitalised for a fortnight in November for weakness.

Zeena, a worker I met at a park in Andheri, who had joined the company in late December, said she was happy with the work, but that her weight had dropped by 7 kg in the three weeks since she had started working for the company. “We do a lot of running around for this job, so it was bound to happen,” she said.

While all gig-workers face some risk of dealing with rude, hostile and unreasonable customers, domestic workers find this risk amplified because they have to enter into the private spaces of those who hire them.

Indeed, research notes that domestic workers are “prone to mistreatment and harassment” because they work in “private, invisible spaces”.

Workers Scroll spoke to said often customers would grow irate because they had unfair and inconsistent expectations of the amount of work that workers had to perform.

Beena noted, “Even if the houses are of the same size, a house which has bachelors who clean only once in a week and a house where a domestic worker visits daily require different types of attention. But we have to do all the work in the same time.”

While apps give customers the option of extending bookings, workers said they were often prodded by customers to work faster or longer without additional pay. “During our training, we are told to stop our work if the booking time gets over,” said Kamla. “But customers get unhappy if we don’t finish their work. So, we have to try and do as much as we can to please them.”

Workers cannot afford to displease customers because they need customers to rate them well on the apps. Across all three platforms, they noted that only ratings of 4.5 stars and above, out of five, were considered to be good – anything below was considered poor.

The Fairwork report noted, “Across sectors, platforms rely on rating systems to make decisions around deactivations and pay calculations. Such rating systems are not neutral. They are known to reflect and amplify social biases.”

Workers at Insta Help claimed that if they received more than three such “bad” ratings, they would receive calls from the company asking why their work was falling short, and they would be sent for retraining.

In rarer but more serious situations, workers faced harassment and verbal abuse. “Customers can call us all sorts of names, and misbehave with us, but we are trained to always respond to them calmly,” said Beena.

In Kandivali, workers with one platform said that one of their team members had been attacked by a customer with a knife and received cuts on her hand. The worker did not receive much support from Snabbit, they recounted, and eventually stopped coming to work.

Workers are also sometimes made to do demeaning and unsafe tasks. “The kind of work we do is neecha [or lowly’ kaam,” said Priya, a Snabbit worker from Andheri. “So, people feel they can get away by saying anything.”

She recounted one particularly distressing instance. “I was asked to clean a filthy toilet which had feces spread everywhere,” she said. “I politely told the customer that I would not clean the toilet but I could do any other work in the house. The customer got really angry and started swearing at me.”

The customer eventually cancelled her booking, she said. Priya complained to her supervisor about the experience, and said she was assured that she would not be sent to work at the same house again.

Other Snabbit workers confirmed that the platform allowed them the option of avoiding attending to certain customers – specifically, they said they can block up to five customers if they do not want to work at their house again after one visit.

However, Insta Help workers said they did not have the choice to opt out of a specific customer’s bookings. “One time, I had to call and remind a customer that she has not liked my work, but that I had been booked to her house again,” said Kamla.

The platforms did not respond to Scroll’s queries about these specific incidents or about their policies to protect workers from mistreatment, harassment and abuse.

Workers also spoke of facing casteist discrimination from customers – some noted, for instance, that they were often not allowed to use washrooms in the houses they visited. Some also said that they were not offered water, or that when they were, it was in distinctly different utensils from those used by members of the household.

One Muslim worker said she faced discrimination because of her religion. After struggling to sign up on the platforms at first, she recounted, she registered as a worker with Pronto. But customers frequently discriminate against her, she noted. “Almost every second day, I get a customer who asks me if I am Muslim, and tells me that they won’t allow a Muslim worker in their house,” she said. “I then have to call my supervisor who gets them a Hindu girl instead.”

Source: Scroll
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