When Gig Hiring Outpaces Quality: The Risks Behind Rapid E-Commerce Expansion in India

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Sep 16
4 min read

By: Zenia Pearl V. Nicolas Diwali is coming, and you can feel it everywhere. Banners stretch across bazaars, delivery bikes buzz through traffic, and warehouses in Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru are bursting at the seams. For India’s e-commerce platforms, this is the season that makes or breaks their year. To cope with the rush, companies are onboarding workers at a pace never seen before. Delivery riders, packers, sorters, thousands of new recruits, hired almost overnight. The work is quick, the pay comes fast. But the checks? Not always. Reports now show that fake IDs, mismatched addresses, and skipped background verifications are slipping through in the scramble.

The Hiring Surge

A September 15 report from

confirmed what many insiders already suspected: gig hiring is up roughly 20–25% compared to last year, helped by lower GST slabs that have made operations cheaper. The same report pointed to weak guardrails: fudged IDs, addresses that don’t match, and verification lapses slipping in despite “stringent checks.”

The problems aren’t just on paper

Earlier this year in Mumbai’s Dharavi, inspectors found fungal contamination and expired stock at a quick-commerce dark store; Maharashtra FDA suspended the facility’s licence, underscoring how compliance can falter under pressure. (

) Food companies, too, filed complaints, warning that quick-commerce partners weren’t living up to basic hygiene standards in dark stores.

Why the Shortcuts

Ask anyone in the industry and the reasons sound familiar. Speed is the first. Customers expect groceries in half an hour, not half a day. Every rider counts, and that urgency means documents don’t always get checked as carefully as they should. Oversight is another: rules on worker verification and food safety exist, but enforcement is uneven across cities. Cost matters too, proper checks take time and money, and in a discount-driven market, compliance can feel like a luxury.

What It Costs

Skipping checks isn’t a victimless shortcut. For customers, it’s a safety issue. A wrong parcel can be replaced. Trust is harder. For workers, weak paperwork leaves them exposed: without proper documentation, wages can be delayed and disputes harder to fight. For companies, the damage can be brutal, one viral incident can push users to delete an app overnight. The fallout is already visible. India’s Food Safety and Standards Authority (FSSAI) ordered platforms to ensure FoSTaC training for food handlers, upload photographs of storage facilities, and disclose warehouse details on the FoSCoS portal, bringing storage out of the shadows and into regulatory view. And in Mumbai’s Dharavi, the dark-store licence suspension over fungus and expired stock became a cautionary headline.

Scrambling for Control

Some firms are moving to plug the gaps. Identity-verification partners told

they’ve blocked around 10,000 suspicious profiles so far this festive season, compared with ~30,000 last festive season, evidence that vetting is catching issues but also that attempts to slip through persist.Several brands have renegotiated contracts, adding stricter hygiene, audit, and indemnity clauses with quick-commerce partners.Regulators, for their part, have signalled wider inspections and surprise checks at dark stores nationwide. Still, implementation lags. Recruiters under pressure to fill rosters quickly admit that obvious errors sometimes get ignored. The gap between promises and practice remains wide.

Beyond the Festive Rush

This season’s rush is a snapshot of the gig economy’s core tension: speed versus trust. Flexibility fuels growth, but too much of it undermines the very foundation on which platforms operate. The firms that treat verification as optional may enjoy a short-term spike. But the ones that see it as essential, no matter the cost may come out stronger, with customers and workers who stay loyal long after the festive sales end. Technology: AI-powered ID checks, fraud-detection tools, digital compliance dashboards will help. But at the end of the day, it still comes down to human judgment. Trust, after all, can’t be automated.

What Lasts Beyond Diwali

India’s e-commerce boom was built on speed. But this Diwali season is showing that speed without care is a shaky promise. Delivering in 30 minutes means little if customers lose faith in the process. The real work begins long before the package leaves a warehouse. It starts with the worker who signs up, hands over an ID, and is trusted to represent a brand at someone’s door. Get that wrong, and the whole chain wobbles. Get it right, and the delivery arrives with something far more valuable than speed: confidence. If “speed vs trust” hit home, take the next step with peers at

hrX Indonesia 2025

—a one-day conference on skills-first hiring, AI, and practical guardrails.

Nov 26, 2025 • 8:00–16:00 • Shangri-La Jakarta.

References

“Quick-commerce, e-commerce firms’ festive gig hiring spree weak in due diligence.” , Sep 15, 2025. (20–25% YoY surge; lower GST tailwind; 10k vs 30k blocked profiles; vetting gaps.) The Economic Times
“Quick commerce industry’s hygiene headache explained.” , Jun 16, 2025. (Hygiene lapses; Dharavi findings; Pune licence context; re-inspection and June 14 resumption.) The Economic Times
“Concerns rise over hygiene standards in dark stores amid quick commerce boom.” , Jun 7, 2025. (Packaged-food firms’ complaints; stepped-up inspections.) The Economic Times
“India enforces stricter transparency, food safety training for e-commerce.” , Aug 27, 2025. (FoSTaC training; photographs + warehouse details on FoSCoS.) FoodNavigator-Asia.com
“Fungus on food, expired goods: … Dharavi loses licence.” , Jun 2, 2025. (FDA suspension over fungus/expired stock; unsanitary conditions.) The Times of India
“Food safety lapses: Brands tighten quick commerce terms.” , Jun 27, 2025. (Stricter hygiene clauses; audit/indemnity language.) The Times of India
“Govt may increase scrutiny on quick commerce firms following hygiene, food safety issues.” , Jun 12, 2025. (Plans for wider oversight and surprise checks.) The Economic Times

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