A one-year-old law gets its enforcement teeth
On May 21, 2026, the Karnataka labour department issued a notice directing every registered aggregator and platform operating in the state, think ride-hailing, food and grocery delivery, logistics and e-marketplace apps, to constitute an Internal Dispute Resolution Committee (IDRC) within their operations. The notice was issued under Section 22 of the Karnataka Platform-Based Gig Workers (Social Security and Welfare) Act, 2025, read with Rule 26 of the accompanying Rules.
Each IDRC must include a chairperson at senior management level, two other management representatives, and at least three senior gig workers, with at least two of those worker members women. Platforms with multiple business units or branches may need to stand up more than one committee. The panel's job is to hear grievances over payouts, deductions and terminations, and it has fifteen working days to attempt a resolution.
The practical effect: a platform can no longer switch off a worker's account and move on. Under the Act, any termination or deactivation has to be in writing, follow principles of natural justice, and give the worker fourteen days' notice before it takes effect. The IDRC is the venue where that notice gets tested before it becomes final.
Part of a longer rollout, not a standalone rule
The May notice is the fourth milestone in a sequence that started over a year ago. Karnataka's cabinet cleared an ordinance in April 2025, and the state enacted the Karnataka Platform-Based Gig Workers (Social Security and Welfare) Act with effect from May 30, 2025, the first state-level social security law in India written specifically for app-based gig workers.
The Rules that operationalize the Act, covering registration, reporting and grievance procedure, followed on November 19, 2025. The state then constituted the Gig Workers' Welfare Development Board on January 27, 2026, and on February 13, 2026 issued the government order operationalizing the welfare fee itself: a charge of 1 to 5 percent on the payout for each gig worker transaction, with per-transaction caps that vary by category, ₹0.50 to ₹1.00 for ride-hailing, ₹0.50 for food and grocery delivery, ₹0.50 to ₹1.50 for logistics, ₹0.50 to ₹1.00 for e-marketplaces and ₹1.50 for professional services. Platforms are required to self-declare and remit that fee quarterly, within five working days of each quarter's close.
Read as a sequence, the last thirteen months show a state building out a full compliance stack around gig work: registration, funding mechanism, governing board, and now a due-process rule for the one action platforms use most, deactivation.
Why HR and compliance teams outside Karnataka should read this closely
Karnataka is not the only state discussing gig worker rules, but it is the only one to have moved from bill to fully staffed enforcement in about a year. For any national platform, that means Karnataka-specific obligations, worker registration within 30 days of onboarding, aggregator registration within 45 days of the Act's enforcement, and now a documented, panel-reviewed deactivation process, sit on top of whatever workforce classification policy the company already runs elsewhere in India. A national HR or people-ops function cannot treat this as a regional carve-out handled by the local legal team. The IDRC requirement touches the same systems that log performance flags, ratings-based suspensions and algorithmic deactivation triggers, and those systems typically are not built with a state-mandated documentation trail in mind.
The other read-across is procedural, not just geographic. This is the first Indian gig work statute to legislate something close to a termination hearing for platform work, worker representation on the panel, a fixed notice period, a written reasons requirement. Regulators in other states now have a working template to point to, rather than a hypothetical one.
What is unresolved
The Act and its Rules do not specify what happens if a platform's IDRC misses the fifteen-working-day window, or what recourse a worker has if the committee splits along management-versus-worker lines. The PRS India bill brief and government notification set out the committee's composition and mandate but leave escalation procedure to be worked out in practice. How aggregators staff, document and audit these panels over the next few quarters, and whether the fifteen-day resolution window holds up against actual grievance volume, will determine whether the rule functions as real due process or as a paperwork requirement platforms satisfy on paper only.
Sources: Lexology · StudyIQ · Deccan Herald · SCC Online · PRS India