Aanchal (name changed) thought she was stepping into a better life. At 22, she had already taken on responsibilities that came too early. She left school after Class 12 to support her family—a mother and two younger siblings who depend entirely on her income. For years, she worked at a small pharmacy, earning Rs 15,000 a month. It wasn’t much, but it was steady.
Then she saw the poster. It promised Rs 25,000 a month.
The offer came from InstaHelp—a fast-growing, app-based domestic services platform launched by Urban Company. It connects households to its empanelled ‘partners’ for cleaning, dishwashing, laundry, and food preparation, often within minutes. With services priced around Rs 99 per hour, the platform has scaled rapidly across Indian cities, riding on the demand for “instant” convenience.
To workers, it offered something else: the promise of higher earnings, bulk payments every 15 days, steady demand—and a foothold in the gig economy.
“I thought even if the work is considered menial, at least I will earn more,” Aanchal said.
Four months in, that promise has thinned out.
Today, her earnings are shaped by factors she says she can neither predict nor fully understand—penalties linked to customer ratings, last-minute cancellations, and deductions for late arrivals. The arithmetic, she says, is never explained.
“You don’t know how much will get cut or why,” she said. “The money is never fixed.”
Some of her peers did manage to earn what was promised, in the early days, when the platform was new and deductions were rare. But in recent months, she says, that has changed. No one she knows is making that amount anymore. Having joined later, Aanchal feels even more exposed to a system where earnings are tightly tethered to opaque metrics she is still trying to understand.
Last month, after a series of deductions, she was left with just Rs 4,000 in hand.
Part of it stemmed from a week she couldn’t work. While on the job, Aanchal says she suffered an electric shock at a client’s home. She took time off to recover—but the break came at a cost. Each missed day meant a Rs 1,000 deduction. The days away also meant spending out of pocket on doctor visits and medicines.
When she reported the incident, she says, there was little support.
“They didn’t really listen,” she said, referring to both the household and her supervisor. “It felt like they didn’t believe me.”
The rest of the cuts followed in ways she still struggles to track—ratings, late arrivals, cancellations. By the end of the month, most of what she had earned had been chipped away.
“The rent of my house alone is Rs 7,500. I had to borrow money that month,” she said.
Digitised Work, Same Old Insecurities
What Aanchal describes is not just a failure of one platform. It points to a broader shift in how domestic work is being reorganised—and who bears the cost.
As labour and public policy researcher Namrata Raju explained, platforms like InstaHelp are entering an already fragile labour market—one where domestic workers have long operated without contracts, protections, or stability.
“Apps are now mediating a labour market that was already fraught,” she said, pointing out that companies still stop short of recognising workers as employees—allowing them to sidestep basic benefits.
Layered onto this is the nature of domestic work itself—deeply gendered, often undervalued, and shaped by caste and class hierarchies.
“Women make up the bulk of this workforce, facing not just low and uncertain wages, but also discrimination and poor working conditions,” she said.
Platforms, she suggested, may be changing how the work is delivered, but not necessarily the conditions under which it is done.
Aanchal is not alone. Several women who once held relatively stable jobs moved to InstaHelp, drawn by the promise of Rs 25,000 and the idea of moving up, only to find themselves in more precarious work. They signed up for a system reshaping domestic work into something faster, more fragmented, and tightly controlled by an app. What was once negotiated in person is now assigned by an algorithm, timed, rated, and priced in real time.
InstaHelp—earlier piloted as Instamaid in Mumbai in 2025—positions itself as a quick, on-demand alternative to traditional house help. Following criticism of the term “maid,” the service was rebranded to emphasise “dignity of labour”.
In a post on X, Urban Company said partners earn Rs 150–Rs 180 per hour, with “assured” monthly earnings of at least Rs 20,000 for those working around 132 hours a month (22 days × 6 hours). The company also highlighted free health insurance and on-the-job life and accidental cover for workers.
On the ground, this promise doesn’t hold. Several workers told Decode they work 8–9 hours a day, take just 4–5 days off a month, yet earn far less than promised—sometimes half or even less.
Falling Pay, Rising Work—And a Protest
On April 15, that gap between promise and reality spilled onto the streets.
At the Urban Company hub in Noida Sector 60, over 50 women gathered early in the morning—angry, exhausted, and determined to be heard. By 9:30 am, the protest had begun. Within an hour, it was over. Police dispersed the gathering, detaining at least 15 women. Several others were injured in the use of force.
Among them was Bindu (name changed). In her early 30s, she had left a tailoring warehouse job she had held for 13 years, drawn by the same promise that brought Aanchal in.
“I thought I would earn at least Rs 25,000 for sure,” she said, tending to a fresh wound.
In the early days, she said, that seemed possible. “There were about 4–5 houses in a day, and if you worked through the month, you could reach that amount.” Leaves were rare—not because they weren’t needed, but because the workload felt manageable.
Now, she says, the rhythm of work has hardened. Workers are often assigned 8–9 houses a day, stretching the workday to 10–11 hours.
“The work has increased, and the pay has turned unpredictable,” she said.
Earlier, she earned about Rs 13,000 a month—stretching to Rs 16,000 with overtime. Now, she says, her income is often the same, sometimes even less, despite longer hours.
“The company should have been clear from the start,” she said. “We didn’t know all these ratings and deductions would come in—things we have no control over.”
Bindu is the sole earner in her family, supporting an ailing husband and two school-going children. Like Aanchal, she says it is the uncertainty that weighs the most.
Economist Mitali Nikore says this is where the problem lies. “Just because work is broken into tasks doesn’t mean workers shouldn’t have rights,” she said. Clarity on earnings and working conditions, she argues, must come before workers make the shift—not after.
For many, that clarity arrives too late.
“Earlier, at least I had a place to sit and work,” Bindu said. “There was a fan above my head, a supervisor I could go to, and a fixed salary.”
Now, she added, it doesn’t even feel like a job—just a series of tasks, long hours, and no guarantees attached.
“There is nowhere to sit, nowhere to go”
After the protest was pushed away from the hub gate, the women didn’t disperse so much as drift. Small groups walked quickly, looking for corners where they could pause without being moved again. Police personnel kept urging them on, warning against regrouping.
Nearly a kilometre away, near a metro station, they finally stopped. Sitting on the pavement, catching their breath, the slogans gave way to quieter, fragmented conversations.
The first complaint surfaced almost immediately: there is nowhere to wait.
“Between bookings, we have no place to sit,” one worker said. “Other gig workers at least have a vehicle of their own. We are just on the road.”
They described spending hours between jobs in parks, outside residential complexes, or on metro pavements—often being shooed away by guards or residents, with no place to sit or even access a washroom.
“People look at us like we don’t belong there,” another said. “Sometimes they abuse us, sometimes they just ask us to leave.”
The gap between what was promised and what actually reaches them has become a point of constant frustration. “We were told we could earn Rs 25,000. Now many of us are making Rs 10,000–Rs 12,000,” one of them said.
“Rs 1,000 is cut for one leave we take. According to their own math it should be Rs 833—if they promised Rs 25,000 for 30 days, then why 1,000?” another worker asked.
Even breaks exist more on the app than in reality. “It shows a lunch break of 15 minutes, but where is the time?” one woman said. “By the time you step out of a society and reach the next place, those 15 minutes are gone.”
At customers’ homes, boundaries blur. Tasks stretch beyond what is assigned, often spilling past scheduled time, with workers saying they are treated in ways they did not experience in their previous, more structured jobs.
“They make us do deep cleaning of washrooms and fan cleaning,” they said. “We are not supposed to do it. We can’t say no because it will lead to lower ratings.”
Ratings, they added, loom over everything. Three consequent low ratings means ID is blocked with no explanation given.
Cancellations and refusals—once negotiable—now come with penalties. Turning down a job, even for safety, can mean losing pay. Many said they avoid households with only male occupants, but doing so often comes at a cost.
Travel between jobs is paid out of their own pockets. The result is a workday defined by constant motion—with no place to rest, no fixed income, and little control.
“We are always working,” one woman said. “But it doesn’t feel like we are earning.”
What emerges from these accounts is not just a story of falling wages, but of women leaving stable jobs for something they believed would be better, only to find “flexibility” and “formalisation” blur on the ground.
“Formalisation” or just a new layer of informality?
For researcher Namrata Raju, the promise of formalisation needs closer scrutiny. While platform work is beginning to see some regulatory attention, domestic work remains one of the least protected sectors.
For workers already navigating precarious conditions, such models can easily turn exploitative—especially when built around “instant” services that prioritise speed over dignity, she said. “If workers allege that there is no transparency surrounding their wages and even the basic employer–employee relationship, that is extremely concerning,” Raju said, adding that this “raises serious questions about how companies like this are able to skirt basic corporate accountability.”
Economist Mitali Nikore adds that the idea of formalisation itself may be misplaced. Many of the women joining these platforms are not long-time domestic workers, but younger entrants choosing between different kinds of gig work—delivery, beauty services, or home-based tasks.
“In that sense, platforms are not formalising an existing workforce but redirecting a new one into another form of informal labour,” she said.
The deeper barriers remain unchanged. Limited childcare, safety concerns, and social norms continue to shape women’s ability to work. “Those constraints haven’t disappeared,” Nikore said. “So moving to a platform doesn’t automatically mean better or more secure work.”
Both experts point to a deeper issue: recognition. Workers are still not treated as employees, keeping them outside basic protections. For Raju, meaningful change would require acknowledging them as workers, enabling collective bargaining, and recognising the home itself as a workplace.
There have been policy moves in this direction. The Code on Social Security, 2020, introduced provisions for gig and platform workers, while initiatives like the e-Shram portal aim to build a national database of informal labour. Some states, like Karnataka and Telangana, have proposed welfare boards and cess-based models.
But on the ground, workers say little has changed.
Across platforms—ride-hailing, food delivery, home services—the complaints remain unchanged, sudden blocking of IDs, opaque rating systems, and little transparency in how earnings are calculated.
For workers like Aanchal and Bindu, that opacity is constant. Despite growing policy attention, their everyday experience of gig work remains shaped by systems they neither control nor fully understand. Many of them made a deliberate trade—leaving stable, if modest, jobs for the promise of Rs 25,000. What they found instead, they say, is work that pays less, demands more, and offers even fewer guarantees.
Decode has reached out to Urban Company for comment, and will update this story if they respond. In February, the company posted on X that InstaHelp had crossed 50,000 daily bookings. In another post in March, it said the platform had completed over a million bookings.
Financial disclosures show how quickly the InstaHelp service of Urban Company has grown—from about Rs 1 crore at launch to Rs 10 crore in the next quarter, and Rs 28 crore soon after—even as questions around what workers actually earn continue to linger.