Zomato

Gaurav Rathore

Zomato's published figures say its average delivery partner worked 38 days in all of 2025, at about seven hours a day. India’s social security rules, notified on 8 May, let a gig worker qualify for benefits only after 90 days with one app, or 120 across several, in the prior financial year. The debate on whether gig work is India’s next IT revolution runs on a bigger count, the 31 lakh people who earned through Zomato and Blinkit at any point in FY26. The two apps averaged about 9 lakh active partners a month between them. Eternal’s annual report says most partners work part-time to top up another income. If you’ve built a marketplace, you’ll recognise these rules as an active user definition written into law. The average Zomato partner sits at less than half of that line, so the livelihood claim and the safety net count different groups of people, a gap you can see because the company disclosed its average. I think there’s a fair case for the line itself, because someone riding part-time to top up a salary already has another income. A fund spread across everyone passing through could protect nobody well. The open question is who sits between 38 and 90 days, and whether their other income is real. Eternal hopes to grow its livelihood reach from over 1% of Indians, families included, to 5% by 2030. If that growth comes from more people working a few weeks a year, each extra lakh of earners adds far fewer people above the line. When you’re drawing an active line for a loyalty tier, an incentive slab, or a benefit, set it from the distribution. An average like 38 days hides exactly the people sitting just under 90. PS: open to AI, growth, GTM, or strategy roles.