Like school bullies, Indian regulators torment the weak but pander to power

What do you call someone who comes down like a tonne of bricks on ambitious youngsters with career aspirations but crumbles like a cookie in the face of a market-leading company flexing its dominance?The rest of the world terms them bullies. In India, we call them regulators.If this strikes you as Macaulay-esque prejudice against Indian institutions, compare the Directorate General of Civil Aviation’s (DGCA’s) capitulation in the face of IndiGo’s blackmail with the Commission on Air Quality Management’s (CAQM’s) imminent clampdown on young men and women looking to earn living by delivering goods and services for e-commerce giants using bikes bought with borrowed money.Come January, even as they struggle to keep up with the monthly instalments on their bikes, gig workers who switch between aggregators or are new to such work will find their livelihood deemed illegal in the National Capital Region.

The entire e-commerce, food delivery and quick commerce economy would stand disrupted, with CAQM mandating that only electric vehicles be added to the vehicles already registered for use in deliveries.Let us first explore the implications of the CAQM’s valiant effort to improve the quality of air in the NCR. Its Direction No 94 says, “No conventional ICE (internal combustion engine) vehicles running purely on diesel or petrol shall be further inducted in the existing fleet of four-wheeler LCVs, four-wheeler LGVs (in the N1 category – up to 3 5 tonnes) and two-wheelers with effect from 01 01.2026.” The ‘existing fleet’ referred to here are the fleets of “motor vehicle aggregators, delivery service providers and e-commerce entities”.At first glance this would seem to exempt gig workers, who own at best a single two-wheeler of