As Diwali arrives, homes across north India are being scrubbed and polished to welcome the goddess Lakshmi – and perhaps, the first touch of winter. Once upon a time, this was a family ritual: everyone joined in the cleaning, sometimes helped by the neighbourhood bai or a friendly freelancer with a broom and a transistor radio.
Today, the festival season has a new ally.
We reach not for the broom, but for our phones – UrbanClap (now Urban Company); or, if it’s a feast we have in mind, Swiggy, Zomato, or another from their tribe – all promising spotless homes, sumptuous meals, safe transactions, and service “guaranteed.”
But this simple act of outsourcing our Diwali cleaning, or feasting, tells a deeper story about India’s economy and culture. In a nation overflowing with cheap labour, our faith in proof has quietly shifted – from certificates on the wall to stars on a screen substituting for experience (or a semblance of them), vouched for by the platform itself.
The Low-Skill, Low-Wage Equilibrium
For decades, India has been stuck in what development economists call a low-skill–low-wage equilibrium. Over 90 per cent of our workforce operates in the informal sector, where productivity and wages remain low. Here, formal qualifications rarely matter. Employers – whether in construction, manufacturing, or domestic work – care more about cost and compliance than about training certificates.
For a worker, investing time and money in a government-approved course rarely pays off. The return on certification is too small to matter. In this ecosystem, both sides quietly agree to stay informal.
Government skilling missions, however ambitious, have barely scratched the surface – with only 4–5 per cent of workers formally trained. The problem isn’t supply. It’s that the demand signal itself is broken.
Pushing for certification in such a landscape is less a reform than a ritual – a gesture of faith in a market that isn’t listening.
The Platform Pivot: Trust-as-a-Service
And yet, millions of Indians – you and I included – happily pay a premium for services through apps like Urban Company without ever checking whether the person who shows up is certified.
Why? Because we’re not paying for labour. We’re paying for trust.
Urban Company and its cousins have solved a problem that the government couldn’t: the trust deficit that defines India’s informal economy.
They’ve replaced static paper credentials with a living, algorithmic reputation system:
- Accountability – If something goes wrong, the platform steps in.
- Predictability – Fixed pricing and defined service categories remove guesswork.
- Vetting – Basic background checks and in-house training build a layer of institutional trust.
The five-star rating has become a more powerful credential than any laminated certificate.
We no longer verify people; we verify platforms.
The State’s Catch-Up Game
The government, of course, has taken notice. Initiatives like the Skill India Digital Hub (SIDH), ASEEM, and e-Shram aim to digitise India’s labour landscape – creating national databases of workers and job opportunities. But these platforms are still digital directories, not full-service ecosystems. They list skills; they don’t manage relationships. They connect supply and demand but don’t guarantee experience.
To work, such systems must evolve from being registries of labour to curators of trust – handling payments, quality, feedback, and grievance resolution with the same seamlessness that private platforms have mastered.
The Vendor Trap: Vision Outsourced
Execution, however, remains India’s weak spot. Most government tech projects are outsourced to IT giants like TCS. While that ensures reliability, it often results in vendor-driven design – portals that look efficient on paper but feel clunky in practice.
The process inevitably spawns a flood of acronyms, often prefixed with “PM,” creating a crowded landscape of schemes where consulting firms thrive but users remain lost.
Vision gets subcontracted; impact gets delayed.
Beyond Certification: The Reputation Economy
If there’s one lesson in all this, it’s that India’s future of work won’t be built on certificates, but on reputation. For skilling initiatives to matter, they must treat reputation as a dynamic credential – continuously updated through work performance, ratings, and verified transactions.
That means:
Integrating feedback and ratings as part of credentialing.
Covering the full service journey – from hiring to payment to redressal.
Making reputation portable, so a worker’s track record travels across employers and platforms.
Today’s successful chai-wala doesn’t hold a certificate in hospitality. He holds a UPI QR code, a Google Maps listing, and a string of five-star reviews.
The Deeper Reflection
It’s poetic that during Diwali – when we symbolically invite prosperity into our homes – it’s gig workers who make that welcome possible.
We still pray to Lakshmi, but it’s an algorithm that brings her through the door.
Perhaps that’s the quiet transformation of modern India:
We no longer trust people because we have learned to trust systems that promise to manage people.
The question is not whether this is progress, but whether we can make it humane.
Your Turn Now
Have you hired through UrbanClap or another platform this season? Was your confidence in the worker – or in the app? Share your thoughts in the comments.
