India first grew its gig economy — now it seems to be formalizing it.
More than 50,000 delivery partners on Swiggy have filed income tax returns through a facility built into the company’s delivery partner app, together claiming refunds worth Rs. 6.5 crore, the company announced on Thursday. Notably, over a third of these workers were filing tax returns for the very first time in their lives.
The facility was rolled out across both of Swiggy’s delivery businesses — its core food delivery platform and its quick-commerce arm, Instamart — giving gig workers on both fronts access to a simplified tax-filing process without needing to navigate the process independently or hire outside help. Instamart has been on an aggressive expansion run recently, pushing into new categories well beyond its original grocery roots, which has meant a growing delivery workforce coming under the ambit of this tax-filing push as well.
Why Delivery Partners Are Claiming Refunds
The refunds stem from tax deducted at source (TDS), which is deducted as a percentage from the payouts delivery partners earn through the platform. When the total tax deducted over the course of a financial year turns out to be higher than a worker’s actual final tax liability, filing a return allows them to claim back the difference.
The Rs. 6.5 crore figure represents the total value of refund claims that have been filed so far, not money that has already landed in workers’ bank accounts. Swiggy has not shared specifics on how many of these claims have actually been processed or disbursed by the Income Tax Department yet.
To make this possible, Swiggy partnered with three tax-filing platforms — ClearTax, TaxBuddy, and Dvara Money — integrating their services directly into the delivery partner app so workers could file returns from the same platform they already use for work.
More Than Just A Refund
Beyond the immediate cash-back angle, Swiggy is positioning this as a step toward giving its delivery workforce a documented financial identity. A filed income tax return becomes an official, verifiable record of a person’s income, something that gig workers have traditionally struggled to produce.
That record can matter well beyond tax season. Landlords typically ask for proof of income before renting out a property, and banks and NBFCs lean heavily on income documentation while evaluating loan applications. For a workforce that’s largely paid on a per-delivery, cash-flow basis with no traditional payslips, this kind of paper trail has historically been hard to come by.
Saurav Goyal, chief operating officer of Swiggy’s food marketplace business, tied the initiative to this larger goal, saying that long-term stability for delivery partners comes from building a recognized financial identity.
A Signal Of India’s Formalizing Gig Economy
This move fits into a much broader shift playing out across India’s gig and platform economy: the slow but steady formalization of a workforce that has, for years, operated largely outside formal financial and tax systems.
India’s gig economy has expanded rapidly over the last decade, but much of that growth has come with a trade-off — flexibility for workers, but also a lack of the institutional touchpoints (regular payslips, EPF contributions, credit history, tax records) that traditionally establish someone as part of the “formal” economy. That absence has made it harder for gig workers to access credit, rent homes, or qualify for insurance and government welfare schemes tied to income proof.
Efforts like this one chip away at that gap. When a delivery worker files an ITR for the first time, they’re not just potentially getting money back — they’re stepping into a system that recognizes them as an income-earning individual with a financial footprint. That’s the same kind of documentation that salaried employees take for granted, but that gig workers have had to fight for.
This also comes at a time when India’s platform economy is under increasing regulatory and policy attention, with discussions around social security for gig workers, aggregator-level welfare contributions, and formal recognition of platform work as a legitimate employment category. Initiatives that push gig workers toward formal tax compliance — even in small numbers relative to the scale of the workforce — help build the data and documentation trail that policymakers, lenders, and companies increasingly rely on.
With Swiggy counting over 6.5 lakh delivery partners across its food delivery and Instamart businesses — spanning more than 720 cities for food delivery and 131 cities for Instamart — even a 50,000-worker uptake represents a small fraction of its total workforce. It’s also worth remembering that this workforce underpins a business that continues to run at a significant loss even as its order volumes climb, which makes low-cost, high-goodwill initiatives like this one — built largely on partnerships rather than direct spend — an attractive way for Swiggy to invest in its delivery fleet’s loyalty and wellbeing. But as a proof of concept for embedding financial formalization tools directly into gig work platforms, it’s a template that could scale, both at Swiggy and across the wider industry.