Daybreak - A worker-owned Uber is India's fix for its ever-expanding gig workforce

Episode Date: August 31, 2026

Union Home and Cooperation Minister Amit Shah launched Bharat Taxi, a government-backed, driver-owned ride-hailing service built to take on private players like Ola and Uber. It runs as a cooperative so the drivers own it. And when it profits, they keep 80% of the money. Nearly 800,000 have already signed up. It is the government's boldest bid yet to pull gig workers out of a precarious market and hand them a stake in it. There is just one problem. No one in Indian ride-hailing has ever turned a profit. So what is a driver-owned cab service really for, if the payday it promises may never come? Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Amul is probably the closest thing that India has to a cooperative miracle. Millions of small dairy farmers, mostly just owning a cow or two, pulled their milk and built a brand that now sits in our refrigerators across the country. No private boss is pocketing the profits. The farmers themselves own the business and the money flows back to them. Now, hold that thought and picture a very different kind of a worker. The driver, circling the airport for a fair, the woman who arrives to clean your home through an app,

millions of these gig workers in India are running the everyday machinery of urban life while owning almost none of it. When the platforms that they work for make money, that money head straight into the investors' pockets and the app. The workers are only allowed to keep whatever is left after the commission that they pay to the company. So, imagine an Amul for them.

A ride hailing service, for example, that drivers themselves own where the profit returns to the people behind the wheel. And this is more or less the pitch behind Bharat Taxi. It is a cab hailing cooperative launched this February by none other than Amit Shah, India's Home Minister, who also runs a five-year-old ministry

built entirely around cooperatives. Drivers are promised 80% of the profit with just 20% kept back to run the business. Nearly 800,000 have already signed up. It is a genuinely amazing idea. There is just one catch, though. To share a profit, you have to earn one. And an Indian ride hailing, nobody ever has.

So, today we'll look into the government's big bet on cooperatives for gig workers and why the promise sitting at the heart of it may take years to pay out. Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host, Nickas Sharma, and I don't chase the news cycle. Instead, every day of the week, my colleague Rachel Varie. Gheese and I will come to you with one business story that's worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Tuesday, the 1st of September. Let's begin with the promise itself.

Zero commission, no surge pricing and a share of the profits. It sounds like everything that drivers and riders have ever wanted. But look closely and each piece gets shakia. Take the profit sharing part. It only begins once Barrett taxi turns a profit. And nobody in India's right hailing has managed that after a decade of trying. For example, in the last financial year alone, Uber lost 1,400 crore rupees. OLA lost 660 crores, rapido 260 crore rupees.

Basically, just because they're choosing the cooperative route, that does not mean the arithmetic is going to change. And worst, four in 10 working cooperative societies in India already run at a loss. And Bharat taxi is small. It runs about 11,000 rides a day, and if you spread that across the 800,000 drivers, that roughly works out to one ride for every 76 drivers on any given day. One Delhi driver, so she'll put it plainly to my colleague, the Ken reporter Indyaral Singh. On a good day, he gets two Bharataxi rides.

Everything else still comes from Uber and Rapido. Now, the zero commission pitch. The idea is not new. We've all heard about Nama Yatari based out of Bangal that already tried this in 2022, and Uber and Rappado soon rolled out versions of their own. Namayatri earned 20 crore rupees last year and lost 51. And now coming to surge pricing. In fact, Bharat taxi actually does raise fares when demand outstrips supply.

It simply calls it a congestion charge. As one Bangalore ride-hailing founder told the Ken, that is just a fair climbing when cars are scarce under a gentler name. When the Ken checked its prices against Uber and Rapido across five Delhi routes, they landed at roughly the same level, sometimes even higher. Drivers, meanwhile, say that they earn less per kilometer on Bharat taxi than on the private apps. The Zero Commission promise, in short, has left rides about as costly and driving about as thin as before. The same wall is also waiting in home services, where the government wants a cooperative too.

The market leaders there, Insta Help and Snabit, are both losing money fast. Insta Helps' own boss says profitability is at least five years away. As one expert on cooperative banks put it to the kin, in a market this competitive, a cooperative is simply one more player in an already crowded field. So, if the economics are this punishing, why is the government pushing it so hard? More on that in the next segment. A part of the answer is faith in a model. that has genuinely worked before.

Let's go back to Amul for a moment. It succeeded for very specific reasons. Milk is a perishable, so the cooperative kept investing in predictable things like chillers to keep it fresh, plans to turn it into powder, the same logic scaled across Gujarat and then across the rest of the country.

Vivek Bhandari, who once ran the Institute of Rural Management in Anandh, has a line for it. He says, every product carries its own internal logic. And a taxi's logic looks nothing like milks. Cars are expensive to buy and occur to finance. A cooperative bank will not buy a fleet of them.

It is, in short, a messy space. On the ground, it gets messier still. De Vesh, who has helped enroll 50,000 farmers into village cooperatives across Uttar Pradesh, says even counting members is hot. Many societies hold two classes. One buys shares and earns a vote and a slice of. of the profits. The other pays a token 10 rupees for access with no vote and no stake. And the head counts are often fiction. If a society claims 50 members, he says the real number of

active ones might be 10. And that matters, because the government's next idea leans entirely on those membership lists being real. In July, Amit Shah floated a cooperative life insurance company. Its appeal is that it could sell straight to existing members, dairy farmers and credit society members, skipping the entire cost of finding customers. That works only if the members are genuinely there. Now, here is the deeper pattern within Indian cooperatives. A loss-making one often survives anyway once it becomes something other than a business. Take the Indian coffee house chain, for example, run by its own workers since the 1950s. It loses around 10 crore rupees a year in Kerala and has shut 14 outlets in a decade.

And yet, it stays open propped up by nostalgia and rent waivers. Or even Maharashtra sugar cooperatives, mostly controlled by politicians bailed out by the state rather than allowed to fold. Which kind of points to what Bahra taxi may really be. A political asset that happens to run a taxi service. India's gig workforce is set to swell from about nearly 8 million at the start of this decade to more than 23 million by its end. And the government would rather not let that future be decided by whichever app earns the most cash to outlast the rest. Bharat taxi already has the drivers, but the riders and the profit are still over the horizon. What it has in full measure, though, is the promise.

And for Sushil, that promise is enough to keep the app on. his phone and himself on the road waiting for a pay day that may still be years away. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken, India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of a subscriber-only offerings and a full subscription offers daily, long-form feature stories, newsletters and a whole bunch of premium podcasts. To subscribe, head to the ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by my conference. colleagues, Niktha Sharma, and edited by Rajiv CN.