India's quick-commerce sector has built its entire competitive universe around one singular, relentless promise: getting your order to your doorstep in ten minutes or less. What started as a bold claim of efficiency has now hardened into the non-negotiable standard governing the market. The conversation, however, is stuck on treating this as purely a labour issue. A deeper look suggests the problem is more fundamental: it's about whether a market structured around extreme speed is conceptually sound at all.
The Labour Law Fix Is Not Enough
Much of the current policy and public debate frames the 10-minute delivery model as a problem solvable through better labour regulations. The proposed solutions focus on improved wages, insurance coverage, and stricter occupational safety norms for delivery executives. While these interventions are undeniably necessary, they remain critically insufficient. They operate on a crucial assumption: that the underlying competitive structure of the market is legitimate, and the harms are merely a result of labour protections lagging behind technological innovation. This core assumption requires urgent scrutiny.
The central issue lies in how competition law in India evaluates efficiency. Modern antitrust frameworks, tilted heavily towards immediate consumer welfare, prioritise outcomes like faster delivery, greater convenience, and lower prices. Viewed through this narrow lens, ultra-fast delivery appears to be a pure win for consumers. However, this perspective completely obscures the real mechanism through which such blistering speed is achieved. The consumer's gain in immediacy is effectively subsidised by labour practices and pressures that would be deemed unsustainable if they were formally recognised as part of the business model. The market gets to signal efficiency, while the broader social system absorbs the resulting harm.
How Speed Distorts Competition and Externalises Cost
This mischaracterisation is structural, not accidental. Competition law often treats time as a neutral quality parameter, presuming that faster service reflects superior productivity or innovation within the firm. This presumption holds true only when speed is the result of genuine technological or organisational advances that the firm internalises. In the dominant 10-minute model, however, speed is largely achieved by externalising uncertainty—traffic, demand spikes, infrastructural gaps—onto the workers through intense algorithmic management. Here, efficiency isn't produced; it is displaced.
This displacement powerfully reshapes competitive dynamics. The race for 10-minute delivery incentivises companies to compete not by improving reliability, safety, or long-term service resilience, but by compressing time ever further. Firms rationally chase this strategy because the marginal costs of this compression do not appear on their balance sheets. These costs are borne instead by the gig workers through intensified monitoring, penalty-driven metrics, unpaid waiting time, and heightened physical risk. Over time, competition converges on a single, dangerous dimension: how much cost and risk a platform can externalise without triggering regulatory action.
This is precisely why the issue cannot be resolved through labour law alone. Even the most robust downstream labour protections leave intact the core market incentive structure that rewards and demands extreme speed. The model remains profitable precisely because it depends on continual temporal compression. Labour regulation may mitigate harm in the short run, but it does not interrogate whether speed itself has become an illegitimate competitive variable.
Learning from Global Regulatory Choices
Comparative regulatory approaches offer valuable insights. In the United States, cities like New York did not ban app-based delivery but imposed minimum pay standards that internalised costs like waiting time. These measures did more than protect workers; they altered the competitive math, making the economics of ultra-fast delivery less attractive. Platforms responded not by exiting but by recalibrating delivery expectations, proving that speed is not an immutable consumer demand but a variable shaped by regulation.
Similarly, European regulators have started focusing on algorithmic management as a structural antitrust and labour concern. By treating certain forms of automated control as regulatory triggers, EU policy implicitly acknowledges that markets should not compete on the basis of unchecked coercion, even when consumers see short-term benefits.
The lesson for India is clear: speed itself need not be abandoned, but the law must legitimately constrain how it is pursued. India now faces a critical regulatory choice. To treat 10-minute delivery as a neutral expression of consumer preference is to accept a conception of efficiency utterly divorced from accountability. A more coherent approach would recognise that markets are legal constructs, and regulators are fully entitled to define the boundaries of fair competition. When speed operates as the governing principle of a market rather than a contingent outcome of innovation, it demands scrutiny at the very level of market design.
The analysis draws from an opinion piece by Huzaifa Shaikh, a lawyer and research scholar at the University of Massachusetts, US, first published on January 1, 2026.
