This article examines the regulatory approaches to platform work in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Our analysis explores a critical socio-legal gap in labour law scholarship by providing a comprehensive comparative overview of the platform labour regulations across these three major South Asian economies. It reveals divergence in practices and approaches within the South Asian region, characterised predominantly by laissez-faire , soft law, and deregulatory frameworks. We also demonstrate how the platform economy has accentuated and exacerbated pre-existing informality throughout South Asia, which is grounded in the understanding that insufficient regulatory oversight perpetuates this informality in the labour markets even more. Meanwhile, the recently adopted EU Directive 2024/2831 on improving working conditions in platform work (PWD) has emerged as a global benchmark for platform regulation. Our analysis examines three key areas of the PWD, namely, the presumption of employment, algorithmic management oversight, and collective rights safeguards across South Asian jurisdictions. We find that the existing regulatory framework in the region largely does not incorporate these regulatory aspects and provisions due to structural and institutional constraints, compounded by a deregulatory orientation. Therefore, we examine recent ILO platform standard-setting to evaluate its potential impact on South Asian jurisdictions, with the aim of transposing these principles through an international labour standard. We contend that the ILO standards might provide a promising framework for regulating platform work in these contexts only if it clearly reiterates the right of platform workers.
Katrak et al. (Mon,) studied this question.