Network of welfare hubs for Hyderabad gig workers planned by entrepreneur

A well-known Indian entrepreneur-turned-investor is set to launch the first of what he hopes will become a chain of subscription-based community welfare hubs providing rest and related facilities for the nation’s ever-growing gig workforce.

In July, Aditya Vuchi, an entrepreneur and founder of the investment platform VC Mint, which purchases stakes in technology start-up companies on behalf of itself and other investors, announced a new venture aimed at improving the daily lives of India’s gig workers.

Under the plans, Vuchi will open a pilot welfare facility in Hyderabad in the near future, and hopes to open others in clusters around the city. The centre will offer clean restrooms, resting areas, affordable meals, electric vehicle charging stations, mobile phone charging and repair services, and primary healthcare facilities, including an in-house doctor. The aim is to create safe and comfortable spaces where gig workers can take a break between jobs.

The move comes after a survey, conducted by VC Mint among more than 2,700 gig workers, found that almost all respondents identified a lack of access to clean restrooms as a major obstacle in their day-to-day working lives. Female gig workers also widely expressed concerns about a lack of safe places to take breaks, free from the risk of sexual harassment and assault. 

‘Affordable option’
The community hubs will operate on a monthly subscription model, and while Vuchi has not disclosed the exact subscription fee, he said it would remain affordable for workers earning around Rs.25,000 to Rs.30,000 per month. Access to the hubs will be open only to active gig workers, subject to verification with the respective app-based platform.

Speaking to Business Standard news outlet, Vuchi said the hubs would be much different than existing rest centres provided by app platforms and e-commerce companies. “All of the other big platforms which say we have rest stops, essentially what they’re doing is repurposing either their parcel pickup centres, or putting up small little kiosks on one side of the street, and say that this is a rest stop, but that doesn’t allow true downtime for these gig workers.”

In a LinkedIn post, he argued that the rest centres established by platforms and e-commerce retailers were arguably little more than a “gesture”.

“Walk past any dark-store cluster in Hyderabad after 9pm,” he wrote. “Count the riders waiting on the next ping. Now look for one place where they can sit, drink clean water, or use a restroom.

“Nope, you won’t find it.

“12.7 million gig workers move this country every day. Almost none of them have access to that.”

He added: “Yes, there are gestures. Amazon’s Project Ashray is at around 100 rest centres, scaling to 250 by end of 2026. Rapido has rolled out Recharge Zones across Mumbai, and ran a summer drive handing out a lakh water bottles and ORS packets. These are decent moves and the people building them mean well.

“But let’s be honest about the math. 250 air-conditioned rooms for 12.7 million people is not infrastructure. It’s a press release with a roof. The framing itself is the giveaway: “welfare”, “care”, “relief”, “summer drive”. Pity has a vocabulary, and that’s pretty much it.”

Boost female labour participation
Vuchi added that the potential roll-out of a network of subscription-based welfare hubs could help boost India’s productivity and the female labour force participation rate. 

“Retention, productivity, safety, women’s participation are still stuck at 8-12%,” he wrote on LinkedIn. “None of those numbers move without physical access to rest, water, money and a moment of dignity between two orders. The unit economics and the infrastructure are the same problem.

“Platforms aren’t the villains. They’re optimising for an equation that was never asked to carry rest stops. Someone else has to build that layer at scale, and treat it as core, not CSR.”

He added: “Gig workers in India earn Rs.25-30k a month and there is no business anywhere that treats them as customers – building infrastructure and providing utilities and services tailored to their needs.” 

Initially, the startup intends to build a dense network of hubs in Hyderabad, before considering opening in other cities. “We’d rather have multiple centres within a city so that a gig worker is never more than five to seven minutes away from one,” Vuchi told Business Standard. 

Vuchi added that the first facility will be run as a pilot to identify which services prove most popular before seeking to expand across Hyderabad. He added that the service is intentionally being built as a commercially sustainable enterprise. “Welfare programmes depend on someone else’s goodwill,” he told Business Standard. “We think this has to be a financially viable business if it has to scale across India.”

VC Mint has allocated around $2 million in capital for the first phase of the launch, and intends to raise funds from venture capital investors to help fund future expansion of a network of welfare hubs. 

Opposition MP condemns Indian Government ILO vote 
Meanwhile, on the regulatory front, political leaders continue to raise concerns over gig worker employment rights. Congress MP Shashi Tharoor recently criticised the Union Government for abstaining from a recent vote that saw the adoption of a new International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention on Decent Work in the Platform Economy. The convention, adopted in June 2026, seeks to establish minimum standards for labour conditions, fair pay, safety, and algorithmic transparency for the hundreds of millions of ride-hailing, delivery, and online gig workers worldwide.

In a post on X, Tharoor noted that both Indian employers and workers had voted in favour of the convention, calling the Government’s decision to abstain a “national disgrace”.

“The Indian Government’s decision to abstain on the @ILO’s Convention on ‘Decent Work in the Platform Economy’, which establishes minimum conditions for gig workers and which Indian employers and workers both voted to support, is a national disgrace,” Tharoor said. 

He added: “Instead of abstaining, the government should have endorsed the standards the whole world has agreed upon to protect gig workers, and adopted them in domestic legislation.”
Tharoor further criticised the establishment’s stance, calling it “one more example of the establishment’s tone-deafness to the needs of young Indians, in this case the lakhs who earn a bare living through an app”.

Growth in social security scheme coverage 
Meanwhile, Government measures to ensure gig workers apply for and obtain the social security benefits they are eligible for continue to gather pace. As of 14 July 2026, more than 317.8 million unorganised workers have registered on the government’s e-Shram portal, strengthening efforts to extend social security benefits to workers in the unorganised sector, according to a written reply to a question in the Lok Sabha by minister of state for labour and employment Shobha Karandlaje.

Uttar Pradesh has the highest number of registered workers on the portal with 84.5 million registrations, followed by Bihar (32.4 million), West Bengal (26.7 million), Madhya Pradesh (19.5 million), and Maharashtra (18.6 million).

Among the integrated government welfare schemes, the highest enrolment to date was for the One Nation One Ration Card (ONORC) has recorded the highest enrolment with 244.6 million beneficiaries linked through the portal. This was followed by Ayushman Bharat-PMJAY, with 151 million enrolments and Pradhan Mantri Suraksha Bima Yojana (PMSBY) with 85.3 million enrolments. The Viksit Bharat-Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) has covered 62 million workers, while PM-KISAN has reached 39.6 million beneficiaries through the platform.

Launched in August 2021, the e-Shram portal serves as a comprehensive national database of unorganised workers, covering categories such as migrant workers, gig workers and platform workers. Registered workers are issued a Universal Account Number (UAN), that enables them to register for a variety of social security benefits, depending on their circumstances and eligibility.