# A worker-owned Uber is India's fix for its ever-expanding gig workforce Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/daybreak-5886514/a-worker-owned-uber-is-india-s-fix-for-its-ever-expanding-gig-workforce Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/daybreak-5886514/a-worker-owned-uber-is-india-s-fix-for-its-ever-expanding-gig-workforce.md Podcast: [Daybreak](https://stenobird.com/podcast/daybreak-5886514) Published: 2026-08-31T20:30:00+00:00 Episode link: https://share.transistor.fm/s/ddd2c359 Audio file: https://media.transistor.fm/ddd2c359/d313fd6c.mp3 Processing state: not_requested JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/daybreak-5886514/episodes/a-worker-owned-uber-is-india-s-fix-for-its-ever-expanding-gig-workforce Duration seconds: 551 ## Resource 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. ## Actions - request_transcript: `POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/daybreak-5886514/episodes/a-worker-owned-uber-is-india-s-fix-for-its-ever-expanding-gig-workforce/transcription-requests` — Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode. - read_markdown: `GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/daybreak-5886514/a-worker-owned-uber-is-india-s-fix-for-its-ever-expanding-gig-workforce.md` — Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource. A page view does not enqueue transcription. Agents should invoke `request_transcript` explicitly when they need this episode processed. ## Transcript Full transcripts are not published on public pages unless there is a clear rights basis.