Press Release: December 19, 2025
‘As Digitalisation Deepens, Welfare Systems are Collapsing Under Expanding Exclusions’: New Report on Gig Economy
Release of the State of Finance in India Report 2024-25
New Delhi: Senior economists and activists released the third edition of the State of Finance in India Report 2024-25 today at New Delhi. Economists CP Chandrasekhar & Jayati Ghosh, digital rights activists and legal scholars Usha Ramanathan and Apar Gupta, and former Member of Parliament M.V. Rajeev Gowda dwelled deep into “Decoding the Digital Dystopia” after the release.
They spoke on how digitalisation is not just about transformation but for allowing private capital to extract surplus from the bottom. It is not about the technology, but the institutional framework that holds it. The speakers looked into how companies treat the poor primarily as data subjects, extracting their data under the pretext of integrating them into the digital economy. And as digitalisation deepens, welfare systems are collapsing under expanding exclusions, with no effective feedback loop to correct these failures.
They lamented on the way freedoms are allowed to the fintech space without any effective regulations thereby allowing for privacy breaches and digital frauds. They underlined how the digital loans apps are giving loans without assessment of creditworthiness and the purpose of the loans which are largely being used not for productive purposes, but for consumption.
They also spoke about the precarity of gig workers and the way we have moved from what was called a period of jobless growth to one of job-loss growth in recent years and the inhuman conditions that the gig workers have to endure and the way algorithmic control takes over the lives of the platform labour.
The discussions brought out the inequalities of power written into the digital landscape wherein a microscopic minority leading the big tech in the west concentrate power and wealth at astronomical rates and underlined the need to press for regulation, for addressing the inequities of power that deploys digital technology in its exploitative form.
The report is a first of its kind that expands the domain of finance and economics beyond the confines of ivory tower experts. It invites writings from a cross section of academics, policy makers, activists, social practitioners and of course eminent economists who engage with questions from ground. The report is jointly published by Centre for Financial Accountability, the Economic Research Foundation and Focus on Global South. The editorial board comprises CP Chandrashekhar, Jayati Ghosh, Shalmali Guttal, Joe Athialy and Anirban Bhattacharya.
From the dangers of transforming a citizen into a consumer to the gamification of labour; from the absence of regulation in the government’s Digital Commerce interventions to the highly skewed playing field against women in e-commerce; from the exclusions and privacy breach that it fosters to its complete lack of accountability; from the labour market volatility written into the venture capital based financing model to the algorithmic wage discrimination that monopolization allows – the chapters cover the intricacies of the digital landscape today and the kind of inequities it promotes.
The chapters go on to highlight how platformised governance and digital public infrastructure in the guise of plugging leakages poses technology as the panacea to welfare service delivery. An approach that essentially erases social reality and exposes the most vulnerable to data mining, digital exclusion and privacy breach. This flattening of social realities leaves the most vulnerable behind, the disposables in the digital dystopia.
Each of the authors bring in their own special expertise and experience in their critique and apart from highlighting the concerns they also share with us possible alternatives: both by democratizing the technology and bringing in a rights based framework of accountability. And also by imagining futures beyond just precarious jobs.
Previous Reports:
State of Finance in India 2021-22
State of Finance in India 2022-23
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