Across Shillong, Aizawl and Guwahati, gig work has become a quiet lifeline, improvised, unstable, and indispensable. As the Union government and states converge on a simplified GST architecture, dubbed the GST 2.0, two principal slabs (5% and 18%) with a 40% demerit rate for luxury and sin goods, the formal map is being redrawn.
The Council approved these changes on September 3, 2025, with the government’s own notes emphasising a “citizen-friendly, simple tax” and faster compliance.
Tax maps are not the same as terrain. And in the Northeast, home to patchy networks, expensive logistics and thin state capacity, visibility does not yet translate into recognition.
Clean reset and its silence: The Northeast’s digital turn
Touted as the cleanest reset since 2017, the reform collapses the old four-tier system into 5% and 18%, while reserving 40% for a narrow band of ultra-luxury or harmful goods such as tobacco and high-end vehicles.
On paper, this is clear: essentials move lower or remain unchanged; premium consumption bears the weight of the adjustment. The Council and PIB materials also promise “citizen-centric” procedure pre-filled returns, quicker refunds, and fewer disputes.
Yet even as the formal economy is streamlined, the informal economy remains largely unaddressed. The press notes speak fluently of commodities and standard service categories; they say little about micro-sellers, gig incomes, tips and commissions, or the platform liabilities that determine what reaches a worker’s wallet.
The Northeast region has long borne uneven development. Industrial capital rarely crosses its hills; wage employment in the formal sector remains scarce. In that gap, digital platforms such as delivery and ride-hailing, micro-commerce, and small online services have become both employers and infrastructure.
According to NITI Aayog, India had approximately 7.7 million gig workers in 2020–21 and estimated that this number would reach around 23.5 million by 2029–30. The Northeast’s share is small in absolute terms, but significant in effect: for thousands of young workers, platform incomes are the only viable option left.
Take Guwahati. Quick-commerce and last-mile delivery grew rapidly through 2024–25, as local restaurants plugged into national apps and dark-store hubs stitched together suburban wards.
But move a few hours toward the hills and the picture shifts. In parts of Manipur, Mizoram and Nagaland, roads falter and signals fade. Platform work arrives partial and precarious, viable enough to try, fragile enough to fail.
The national surveys sketch a pattern that tracks here too: the typical delivery worker is in his late twenties, a large share are migrants, and most use multiple apps to stabilise volatile earnings.
The category blurs: a rider may tutor in the evenings; a homemaker sells garments online; a student edits reels for a local channel. The law, however, prefers clean lines. The lives do not.
Where reform misses the worker
For most gig workers, the GST overhaul reads less like simplification and more like erasure. The law still assumes the stability of a shopfront economy, one that sells the same thing every day, records every transaction, and stays within a fixed address. But the digital worker moves between orders and algorithms, between rainy days and cancelled rides.
Under Section 22, registration becomes mandatory only beyond ₹20 lakh in annual turnover or ₹10 lakh in most northeastern states, leaving thousands of delivery riders, resellers, and digital freelancers outside the tax net.
Exclusion, however, comes at a price. Those who remain invisible cannot claim credit for the fuel that keeps their engines running or the data that keeps their phones online. They pay tax on everything they consume but recover nothing in return.
The gaps deepen with definition. Gig work may be service by nature, but the statute still carves services into a maze of categories that few workers, or even small tax officers, can navigate.
Tips, commissions, bonuses, and platform fees all fall into interpretive grey zones. Is a rider’s tip a taxable consideration or a voluntary gesture? Does a delivery partner count as an “aggregator” or a “contractor”?
The law offers no clear answers, and in the absence of clarity, the burden of interpretation tilts toward the state. Revenue protection becomes the default, and ambiguity is absorbed by the worker.
The problem of liability follows close behind. Platforms, rarely classified as employers, occupy a convenient middle ground: they mediate the transaction but often pass compliance risks down the chain.
In the name of aggregation, they can withhold tax at source or adjust payouts to offset filings. When rules blur on who must collect and remit tax, the platform or the worker, it is almost always the worker who ends up paying twice: once through deductions, and again through lost income.
Even the rhetoric of “citizen-centric compliance” overlooks geography. Filing assumes a device, a stable signal, and an office where someone can explain what “platform income” means. In Shillong, Kohima or Aizawl, the infrastructure of compliance is thin, and tax officers are still trained in the vocabulary of goods trucks and shopfronts.
For a gig worker struggling through unstable networks and unfamiliar digital forms, help in Assamese, Mizo, or Khasi is rare. The cost of understanding the law often exceeds the liability itself.
And then there is volatility, the rhythm of the informal economy that never quite fits the annual logic of taxation. Platform incomes rise and fall with the weather, the festival calendar, the price of fuel, or even an app’s algorithmic tweak.
A single busy quarter can push a worker above the registration line, only for the next to drag them far below. The system assumes steadiness; the worker lives in flux. By refusing to account for this rhythm, GST 2.0 continues a familiar pattern: a reform built for those who already belong to the formal world, not for those trying to enter it.
On the ground, the arithmetic feels different
Imti in Dimapur experiences the reform as uneasiness rather than as a policy. She earns ₹14,000–₹16,000 a month delivering for a local app below the line, outside the net. When her phone breaks, she pays ₹3,500 to fix it, which is tax-included and unrecoverable. Each such expense is a small penalty for being small.
In Aizawl, Jonah sells handmade masks and other garments through Instagram and Meesho, carrying the work into product photos, captions and doorstep delivery. His annual turnover is barely ₹50,000. Is he a trader or a service provider? The new tax vocabulary feels distant, built for the visible economy, not for someone whose business lives between a chat window and a courier pickup.
In Guwahati, a rider recalls payment delays during the transition week “system alignment,” the app said. He worries compliance costs will trickle down as they often do through reduced commissions and withheld bonuses.
Where every delay means a day without fuel, even administrative lag becomes a strain. These experiences are not exceptions. They show how the architecture of compliance meets the architecture of inequality: a system built for stability confronting lives defined by instability.
Bridging the fiscal blind spot
If GST 2.0 is the new map, it still has to learn the terrain. Reform that remembers the worker would begin with scale. In frontier states, where most platform earners sit far below national averages, a lighter entry gate matters more than rhetoric: a differentiated registration threshold of ₹5–8 lakh for gig and micro-digital workers would bring people in without punishing them for trying.
The law must also learn to see what it taxes. A defined “gig service” bracket or a modest flat rate after a basic deduction would replace guesswork with obligation and shadows with visibility.
Liability needs the same clarity. Platforms cannot remain convenient intermediaries when it comes to revenue and invisible employers when it comes to risk. The rule should be simple and public: who collects and who remits. In the absence of such a line, ambiguity moves the burden downward, and the weakest party pays first. Compliance, too, has a geography.
A lightweight filing app in Assamese, Mizo, and Khasi, and tax desks in Shillong, Kohima, and Aizawl trained to read platform income, not just the old ledgers of goods and trucks, would make the promise of “citizen-centric” real.
Taxation should also follow the rhythm of the work it governs. Platform income rises with festivals and falls with rain; it is seasonal by design. Quarterly or pro-rata assessments would prevent a festive spike from becoming a year-long penalty.
Pair that with targeted input reliefs on fuel, data, and two-wheeler maintenance, the everyday costs of self-provision that make this labour possible, and formalisation becomes feasible rather than punitive. None of this is radical. It is simply a tax system that recognises where people live, how they earn, and what it takes for them to be seen.
The policy case and the moral one
The case for GST 2.0 is clear enough: fewer classification disputes, stronger consumption, better compliance, and a system that ordinary citizens can understand. The GST Council framed September’s decision as a unanimous step toward simplicity.
It is not unreasonable to aim for a regime where 5% and 18% cover most activity and 40% sits atop a narrow band of goods with obvious social costs.
Taxation is not only revenue; it is a mirror of how the state sees its citizens. Those who are excluded silently bear the burden of exclusion when policy builds gates rather than pathways.
The real test of GST 2.0 will not be in its slabs or returns, but in whether it can bring the periphery into view and turn visibility into dignity.
For the Northeast, that means recognising that formalisation is not resistance; it is aspiration. The rider in Dimapur, the seamstress in Shillong, and the creator in Aizawl are not asking for exemption. They are asking to be named by a system that understands their scale and meets them halfway.
If tax reform is to be more than a ledger exercise, it must reckon with this frontier. A regime that sees only revenue, not the lives it touches, may be tidy on paper but hollow in purpose. The measure of reform lies not in the crores collected, but in whether those at the margins can finally afford to be seen.
Also Read: What does GST 2.0 look like through the lens of women?
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