Gig worker deactivation is not something the central labour codes deal with at all, and the word itself appears nowhere in them. Karnataka and Telangana have since stepped in, defining termination widely enough to catch a blocked account and requiring reasons, notice and a hearing before one.
In 2026, several of the country’s largest delivery and ride-hailing platforms went to the Karnataka High Court to have that state’s gig workers Act struck down. One of the things they want quashed is the notice telling them to set up Internal Dispute Resolution Committees, which is the machinery that makes a platform give a worker reasons before it switches off his account. The High Court has not stayed the Act, though it has told the state government to hold off on coercive action for now and directed the platforms to deposit the welfare fees they owe with the court registry. Around the same time, the Telangana High Court issued notice to a food delivery platform, the State and the Labour Commissioner, after a delivery worker told the court his ID had been blocked without any notice or explanation.
This article sets out what gig worker deactivation is in law, which constitutional questions it raises, and where a deactivated worker can actually go.
Whether a platform owes a worker anything before it switches off his account is the question the rest of this article turns on, and one ordinary sequence shows why it is hard to answer. A delivery rider finishes a shift, opens the app the next morning, and finds he cannot log in. A support message tells him there was a complaint about his behaviour. He is not told who complained, what was said, or what he is supposed to have done.
He asks for the evidence and gets an automated reply. His income stops that day. Nothing has been terminated in any form he can point to, because he was never an employee and there is no letter to challenge. The account simply stopped working.
He has no notice, no reasons, and no hearing. Whether he is entitled to any of the three depends entirely on which state he rides in, and that is a recent development rather than a settled position.
Does the law treat gig worker deactivation as a termination?
Not under the central labour codes. The word “deactivation” does not appear once in the Code on Social Security, 2020, across the whole of its 113 pages. Deactivation is the platform’s operating word, not Parliament’s.
The Code is the central statute that reaches these workers at all. Section 2(35) defines a gig worker as a person who performs work or participates in a work arrangement “and earns from such activities outside of traditional employer-employee relationship”. Section 2(61) defines a platform worker, and section 2(2) defines an aggregator.
On those definitions the Code builds registration, welfare schemes and aggregator contributions. It says nothing about how the relationship ends: no notice period, no requirement of reasons, no grounds, no hearing.
That definition is doing more damage than it first appears. By placing gig workers outside the traditional employer-employee relationship, the Code also places them outside the machinery that would otherwise supply a hearing. Retrenchment, standing orders and notice pay under the Industrial Relations Code, 2020 all run on the status of employee or workman, and a gig worker does not hold it.
So deactivation is neither dismissal nor retrenchment nor termination in any sense the central codes recognise. It is one contracting party switching off another’s access. That vacuum, and not any particular platform’s conduct, is why the argument has been routed through the Constitution instead of through labour law. For what the four codes do cover, see our guide to the 2026 labour codes implementation.
What the state Acts added on gig worker deactivation
Five states have now legislated for platform workers: Rajasthan in 2023, Karnataka, Bihar and Jharkhand in 2025, and Telangana in 2026. Two of them did the thing that matters here. They wrote the platform’s own word into the statute and attached consequences to it.
The Karnataka Platform Based Gig Workers (Social Security and Welfare) Act, 2025 closes the definitional gap directly. Section 2(o) defines “Terminate” or “Termination” to mean “materially restricting a platform based Gig worker’s access to the digital platform, including blocking such worker’s access to the digital platform, suspending a platform based Gig worker, or making the platform based Gig worker ineligible to provide services on the digital platform irrespective of the duration of the same”. Blocking an account is termination by definition, whatever the platform calls it internally.
Section 14(1) then requires the contract to carry an exhaustive list of grounds for termination or deactivation, and section 14(2) provides that an aggregator “shall not terminate or deactivate a Gig worker without giving valid reasons in writing and with prior notice of fourteen days and following the principles of natural justice”. Where the ground involves bodily harm the platform may act immediately, and the worker keeps a right of appeal.
The Telangana Platform Based Gig Workers (Registration, Social Security and Welfare) Act, 2026 follows the same design on a shorter clock. Section 2(r) defines termination to include “blocking, deactivating or suspending access to his account”, again irrespective of the period of restriction. Section 14 permits termination only by following the principles of natural justice after due enquiry, with valid reasons in writing and seven days’ prior notice, and allows immediate termination only where a physical or mental threat to the end consumer is foreseen.
So the answer to whether deactivation counts as termination is now a question of geography. It does in Karnataka and Telangana, by express definition. It does not, anywhere in the central codes, which is precisely the repugnancy point the platforms are running in the Karnataka High Court.
Karnataka went further than notice and reasons. Section 13 requires a platform to tell workers, in Kannada or English or another language of the Eighth Schedule that the worker knows, how to obtain information about the automated parameters that decide their fares, earnings and customer feedback. Section 13(2) then requires platforms to take measures to stop those automated systems discriminating on grounds of religion, race, caste, gender, place of birth or disability.
A European case shows what that sub-section is aimed at, and it is the closest thing yet to a court examining a deactivation algorithm on its facts. In Filcams CGIL Bologna v Deliveroo Italia Srl, the Bologna labour court examined a rider-ranking algorithm the company called Frank. Frank scored riders partly on how often they failed to turn up in the first fifteen minutes of a session they had booked, and on how often they cancelled a booked session at short notice. A lower score meant worse access to the delivery slots, and so less work.
The defect the court found was not in the scoring but in what the scoring ignored. Frank drew no distinction between a rider who simply did not bother to appear and a rider who was ill, or dealing with an emergency, or exercising a right to strike. Treating every absence identically penalised protected conduct along with unprotected conduct, which the court held was discriminatory, and it ordered compensation. The case is Italian labour law and binds nothing in India, but it is a concrete picture of the harm Karnataka’s section 13(2) anticipates: an algorithm can be neutral in its design and discriminatory in its effect, and nobody can see which until the criteria are disclosed.
The constitutional questions gig worker deactivation raises
These questions are not hypothetical, and they are already before the Supreme Court. In The Indian Federation of App-based Transport Workers v. Union of India, a drivers’ federation and two individual gig workers filed a writ petition in September 2021 against the Union and four platforms, among them the operators of Ola, Uber, Dunzo and Zomato. They asked the Court to declare gig workers “unorganised workers” so that the Unorganised Workers’ Social Security Act, 2008 and the older welfare statutes would reach them.
The constitutional grounds are the ones this article is about. The petitioners plead Article 14, on the footing that calling a worker a “partner” rather than an employee is a classification that denies him protections others get for the same work. They plead Article 21. They also plead Article 23, arguing that very low pandemic-era earnings combined with the denial of any benefit amounted to forced labour.
The case has moved slowly and the Court has said so. In November 2024 it gave the Union a last chance to file its reply, and in February 2025 it told the Union to pull up its socks over the delay in operationalising the Code on Social Security. The petition was filed in 2021 and is still pending, which is itself part of the picture for any worker weighing this route.
Take the deactivation clause next, because Indian courts have seen that clause before, though not yet on a platform. In Central Inland Water Transport Corporation Ltd. v. Brojo Nath Ganguly, decided in April 1986, a manager was working under service rules containing Rule 9(i). That rule let the corporation end the service of a permanent employee on three months’ notice, or three months’ pay in lieu, without assigning any reason whatsoever.
He was removed under it. The Supreme Court struck the rule down.
The structural resemblance to a platform contract is close. A power to end someone’s livelihood, exercisable on notice, with no reason required and no hearing. But the case has two separate strands, and merging them is the quickest way to get this wrong.
The first strand is constitutional. Article 14 was available because the corporation was held to be State under Article 12, so an unreasonable term in its contracts could be tested against the guarantee of equality.
The second strand is contractual, and it does not depend on Article 12 at all. The Court held that where parties have unequal bargaining power, a term that is unfair, unreasonable or unconscionable may not be enforced against the weaker party. A private aggregator is not State, so strand one is the open question. Strand two reaches it without needing an answer.
The Article 12 threshold a deactivated gig worker has to cross
Articles 14, 19(1)(g) and 21 all bind the State. The worker’s opponent is a private company. Every constitutional argument in this area therefore arrives at the same gate before it reaches any right at all.
The test for what counts as State came from a seven-judge bench in Pradeep Kumar Biswas v. Indian Institute of Chemical Biology (2002) 5 SCC 111. A body falls within “other authorities” in Article 12 where it is financially, functionally and administratively dominated by the government, and where that control is deep and pervasive. On the face of it an aggregator satisfies none of this. It is privately owned, privately funded and privately run.
There is also authority pointing the other way that a worker’s advisers would have to meet head-on. In Binny Ltd. v. V. Sadasivan (2005), a private company terminated staff under a contract clause allowing termination without assigning reasons. The Supreme Court held the writ petition was not maintainable.
Article 226 can issue against a private body, but only where that body is discharging a public function and the decision under challenge is taken in discharge of that function. Absent a public law element, a private employment termination is not writ material. That is close to the facts a deactivated gig worker brings.
The counter-argument runs on control, and one foreign court has examined that control closely. In Uber BV v Aslam, decided by the United Kingdom Supreme Court in February 2021, two private hire drivers who took bookings through the app argued they were “workers” entitled to the minimum wage and paid leave. The company said it was an agent booking rides for self-employed drivers.
The Court looked at what the company actually decided rather than at what the contracts called the parties. It set the fares. It set the default route. It ran the rating system, and it restricted how far a driver could deal with a passenger.
On that footing the drivers were held to be workers, and to be working whenever they were logged in, within their licensed area, and ready to accept trips. The decision turns on United Kingdom employment legislation and has no binding force in India, but the reasoning is what an Indian worker would borrow: a body that fixes the price, the route, the rating and the terms is not merely a counterparty to a contract.
So the questions are genuinely open, and they are worth stating precisely rather than optimistically. No court has held that a platform aggregator is State under Article 12. No court has held that deactivating a worker’s account is the discharge of a public function.
What a worker would have to persuade a court of is that a platform which controls access to an entire market for labour is exercising something closer to a licensing power than a contractual one, and that ending that access carries the serious civil consequences which, since A.K. Kraipak v. Union of India (1969), attract a duty to hear. Whether that argument succeeds is not something any published judgment has yet decided.
Deactivation and the livelihood rights in Articles 19(1)(g) and 21
The livelihood argument has the better pedigree and the same gate. In Olga Tellis v. Bombay Municipal Corporation, decided in July 1985, pavement dwellers in Bombay challenged their eviction. The Supreme Court read the right to livelihood into the right to life under Article 21, on the reasoning that no person can live without the means of living.
What the Court did next is the part that matters here, and it is routinely misremembered. It upheld the Municipality’s power to clear the pavements. What it required was that the procedure be fair, just and reasonable, and it held that evicting people without giving them a chance to explain was unconstitutional.
The proposition is not that a livelihood cannot be taken away. It is that the manner of taking it away is reviewable. Applied to deactivation, the existence of a power to switch off an account would not be the question. The absence of any process before it is exercised would be.
Article 19(1)(g), the right to practise any profession or to carry on any occupation, trade or business, raises a parallel question on the same footing. A rider whose account is blocked has lost the practical ability to carry on his occupation, though he remains free in law to seek work elsewhere. Whether that loss engages Article 19(1)(g) against a private actor has not been decided.
And Olga Tellis ran against a municipal corporation, which is plainly State. So does most of the useful authority in this field. The gate closes on all three rights at once, for the same reason, which is why the Article 12 question is not one of several issues in a deactivation challenge but the issue on which the constitutional route stands or falls.
Where can a deactivated gig worker go today?
That depends on where he works, and the honest answer for most of the country is nowhere very useful. A worker in Karnataka or Telangana has a statutory route with defined timelines. A worker in the other states and union territories has no statutory right to notice, reasons or a hearing before deactivation at all.
Even the statutory route is not secure. The Karnataka machinery is itself under challenge in the High Court, and the notice requiring platforms to constitute Internal Dispute Resolution Committees is among the things the petitioners want quashed.
The state Acts route for a deactivated gig worker
Karnataka’s Act builds a two-tier grievance system in section 22. A registered worker with a grievance about payouts, deductions or termination may file it with an Internal Dispute Resolution Committee, which every registered aggregator has to constitute, either in person or through a web portal whose link must appear on the platform’s own app.
The timelines sit in the same section and are worth separating carefully, because secondary summaries tend to run them together. Under section 22(4) the Committee must complete its proceedings within fourteen days of receiving the petition and give the complainant a written Action Taken Report. Under section 22(6) it must dispose of the petition by passing an order of redressal within forty five days. Section 22(5) is the worker’s protection against silence: if no Action Taken Report arrives within fourteen days, or the worker is dissatisfied with the redress offered, the grievance goes to the Welfare Board, whose decision is final.
A separate ninety-day appeal to an Appellate Authority exists under section 22(10), but it lies against an order under section 22(9), which belongs to the other track, the one for grievances about entitlements and social security payments from the Board. It is not an appeal from the Committee that hears a termination complaint. Karnataka also requires, in section 13, that platforms tell workers how to obtain information about the automated monitoring and decision-making parameters affecting their fares, earnings and customer feedback, and take measures to prevent those systems discriminating on grounds of religion, race, caste, gender, place of birth or disability.
Telangana’s Act runs on seven days’ notice rather than fourteen, and requires a due enquiry before termination. Rajasthan legislated first, in 2023, but its Act is built around registration and welfare rather than the anti-arbitrary-termination machinery that Karnataka and Telangana later adopted. For a worker deactivated outside these states, none of this is available.
What a court can and cannot do for a deactivated gig worker
Start with the labour department, and expect it to stall. In the matter now before the Telangana High Court, a delivery worker complained to the labour authorities after his ID was blocked. The Joint Commissioner of Labour issued notices to the platform twice. The platform did not appear at either hearing.
The Commissioner then recorded that he had no power to enforce compliance and told the worker to approach the court. That sequence, and not any refusal to help, is what an unrepresented worker is likely to meet.
A writ petition under Article 226 comes next, and runs straight into Binny Ltd. The worker has to establish the public function element before a court will examine the merits of his deactivation at all. Where a state Act applies, that argument is meaningfully stronger, because the platform is then exercising a power the legislature has regulated and conditioned rather than a purely contractual one. Whether a statutory duty to give reasons converts a private decision into a public one is, again, undecided.
The contract route is the one that does not need Article 12. It runs on the second strand of Brojo Nath Ganguly: unequal bargaining power, and a term that is unfair, unreasonable or unconscionable. A deactivation clause allowing an aggregator to cut off access without reasons, in a contract the worker had no power to negotiate, is the same species of clause the Supreme Court refused to enforce in 1986.
This route goes to a civil court rather than a writ court, which is slower and costs more, but it does not require anyone to hold that a platform is State. Our note on breach of contract in the gig economy covers the ordinary contractual remedies in more detail, and our overview of the law for new-age gig workers sets out the wider framework.
Where a state Act does apply, the statutory route should be exhausted first. A worker who has been through the Internal Dispute Resolution Committee and the Board arrives in court with a record: a written complaint, whatever reasons the platform did or did not give, and a documented failure to comply with section 14. That record is worth considerably more than the bare assertion that a deactivation was unfair.
One thing is worth keeping in view as this develops. None of the three Indian proceedings has produced a decision on any of the constitutional questions above. The Karnataka case is a challenge by the platforms to the state’s power to legislate at all, and so far it has produced an interim order that holds off coercive action and parks the welfare fees with the court registry. The Telangana case is at the stage of notice, and the Supreme Court petition has been pending since 2021.
That matters practically, not just as a caveat. A worker filing today is arguing from statute and from analogy, because there is no Indian judgment holding that a platform must hear him before it switches off his account, and none holding that it need not. The law here is being made now, and the first worker to get a reasoned decision on it will make it.
Frequently asked questions
Is deactivation the same as termination under the labour codes?
No. The Code on Social Security, 2020 does not use the word “deactivation” anywhere, and contains no provision governing how a platform ends its relationship with a gig worker. The position is different under the Karnataka Act of 2025 and the Telangana Act of 2026, both of which define termination to include blocking or deactivating a worker’s account.
Does a platform have to give a gig worker notice before deactivating the ID?
Only in the states that have legislated for it. Karnataka requires fourteen days’ prior notice with valid reasons in writing and adherence to the principles of natural justice, and Telangana requires seven days’ notice after a due enquiry. Both allow immediate action in safety cases. Elsewhere in India there is no statutory notice requirement.
Can a gig worker file a writ petition against a platform?
He can file one, but maintainability is the hurdle. Under Binny Ltd. v. V. Sadasivan (2005), a writ under Article 226 lies against a private body only where it discharges a public function and the impugned decision is taken in discharge of that function. No court has yet held that an aggregator deactivating a worker satisfies that test.
Does the right to livelihood under Article 21 apply against a private platform?
That question is open. Olga Tellis (1985) established that the right to livelihood forms part of the right to life under Article 21, but it was decided against a municipal corporation, which is State under Article 12. Whether the same protection can be asserted against a private aggregator has not been decided by any court.
What can a gig worker do if the platform ignores the labour department?
In Karnataka, section 22(5) allows the grievance to be escalated to the Welfare Board if no Action Taken Report is received within fourteen days, and the Board’s decision is final. Elsewhere the practical options are a civil suit on the contract, relying on the unconscionability reasoning in Brojo Nath Ganguly, or a writ petition that must first clear the public function threshold.
References
- The Code on Social Security, 2020 (36 of 2020), sections 2(2), 2(35) and 2(61). Full text checked for the words “deactivation” and “termination” against India Code
- The Karnataka Platform Based Gig Workers (Social Security and Welfare) Act, 2025 (Karnataka Act 72 of 2025), sections 2(o), 13, 14 and 22. Assent 11 September 2025, published in the Karnataka Gazette Extraordinary on 12 September 2025, deemed in force from 30 May 2025 (bare Act, PRS Legislative Research)
- The Telangana Platform Based Gig Workers (Registration, Social Security and Welfare) Act, 2026 (Telangana Act 21 of 2026), sections 2(r) and 14 (bare Act, PRS Legislative Research)
- Central Inland Water Transport Corporation Ltd. v. Brojo Nath Ganguly, AIR 1986 SC 1571, decided 6 April 1986, on Rule 9(i) and unequal bargaining power
- Olga Tellis v. Bombay Municipal Corporation, (1985) 3 SCC 545, decided 10 July 1985, on the right to livelihood under Article 21
- Pradeep Kumar Biswas v. Indian Institute of Chemical Biology, (2002) 5 SCC 111, seven-judge bench, on the test for “other authorities” under Article 12
- Binny Ltd. v. V. Sadasivan, (2005) 6 SCC 657, on writ jurisdiction against a private body discharging a public function
- A.K. Kraipak v. Union of India, AIR 1970 SC 150, on natural justice where serious civil consequences follow
- The Indian Federation of App-based Transport Workers v. Union of India, Writ Petition (Civil) 1068 of 2021, Supreme Court of India, pending. Grounds include Articles 14, 21 and 23; respondents include the Union of India and the operators of Ola, Uber, Dunzo and Zomato (Supreme Court Observer case page)
- Filcams CGIL Bologna v. Deliveroo Italia Srl, Tribunal of Bologna (labour section), on the Frank rider-ranking algorithm and discrimination. Italian labour law, persuasive only (analysis)
- Uber BV v. Aslam [2021] UKSC 5, decided 19 February 2021, United Kingdom Supreme Court, on control and worker status. No binding force in India (UK Supreme Court case page)
- Reporting on the Karnataka High Court challenge to the state’s gig workers Act, including the July 2026 interim order restraining coercive action and directing deposit of welfare fees with the court registry, and on the Telangana High Court notice (The News Minute, LiveLaw, Medianama)
This article is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. For advice on a specific case, consult a qualified advocate.