A new layer of urban work is emerging in Mumbai beyond food delivery, grocery logistics and app-based mobility. Students are taking up short-duration assignments that include accompanying elderly people to hospital appointments, helping with bank visits, supporting events, delivering documents and handling other practical tasks that families and organisations may not have the time to manage themselves.
The development is described in the Doers’ Report 2025, an annual study by student gig platform Tim BuckDo. The report presents the trend as part of a broader “task economy” built around everyday needs that conventional delivery and home-service platforms do not always address. Its central claim is not that a new category of work has replaced established gig sectors, but that urban demand is widening to include tasks requiring time, physical presence, flexibility and, in some cases, interpersonal support.
That distinction matters in a city such as Mumbai, where time pressure, long commutes, high housing costs and geographically dispersed households shape daily life. A working professional may be able to order a meal or book a cab through an app, but those services do not necessarily solve the problem of accompanying a parent to a hospital, waiting in a queue, helping with a bank visit or providing company outside the home. The emerging task economy attempts to fill that gap by matching people who need assistance with students who have time and are willing to work in short-duration roles.
The report is based on data from more than 4.5 lakh students across metropolitan and Tier-2 cities. According to the study, annual gig payouts ranged from around Rs 800 for micro-tasks to Rs 65,000 for high-responsibility roles. Most assignments reportedly generated between Rs 6,000 and Rs 15,000 a month, a band the report describes as “survival income”. These figures are platform data and are self-reported; the company has not claimed third-party verification. They therefore indicate the scale and structure of activity recorded by Tim BuckDo, rather than providing a complete measure of India’s student gig workforce.
Mumbai is identified in the report as India’s “on-ground ops capital”, reflecting the city’s concentration of physical, on-site assignments. Across the platform’s network, 48% of gigs were classified as on-ground, 32% as work-from-home and 20% as flexible-format work. The report places Mumbai, Bengaluru, Delhi-NCR, Chennai, Pune and Hyderabad among the major demand centres. The categories include telecalling, delivery, event support, retail assistance, errands and newer technology-linked work.
The profile of these assignments shows how the urban labour market is extending into areas that sit between formal employment and personal assistance. Some tasks are operational: helping at an event, supporting a retail activity or delivering a document. Others involve social and domestic coordination, such as senior companionship, hospital support, pet sitting, personal shopping, home management and festival or puja preparation. The source material also refers to homework and play support for children. These activities are different in form, but they share a dependence on short periods of available time.
Student participation is central to this model because academic schedules can allow workers to accept assignments that do not fit conventional full-time employment. Tim BuckDo co-founder and chief executive Mythri Kumar said the platform was seeing a broader ecosystem built around everyday consumer needs, with students contributing flexibility while gaining income and work experience. The company describes the shift as a move away from a narrower focus on finding jobs towards creating a flexible layer of work connecting people who need tasks completed with people who have time and skills.
For students in large cities, however, flexibility does not automatically mean financial security. The report estimates that rent, food and commuting in Tier-1 cities can cost between Rs 16,500 and more than Rs 43,000 a month. Its comparison puts Tier-2 city costs between Rs 10,300 and Rs 20,000. Against those expenses, the reported gig earnings of Rs 6,000 to Rs 15,000 a month often represent only a partial contribution to living costs in metros.
The report uses a “Gig Survival Index” to compare average monthly gig earnings with monthly survival costs. It says gig income can cover up to 100% of living costs in some Tier-2 cities, while the reported coverage in metros is between 40% and 70%. The measure is useful for showing why the same payout can have different consequences depending on the city. A student earning a similar amount in a lower-cost location may cover a much larger share of expenses than a student in Mumbai, where accommodation and commuting can absorb a substantial portion of income.
This difference also reveals a wider urban issue. Gig work is often presented as a question of access to earning opportunities, but its usefulness depends on the cost structure of the city in which that work takes place. When rent, food and travel rise faster than available income, flexibility can allow students to manage schedules without necessarily giving them economic stability. The result is a form of work that may help meet immediate expenses while remaining insufficient to replace a regular income.
Demand for these assignments is uneven. The report says some listings receive between 10 and 50 times more applicants than available openings. Telecalling, delivery, social media and event-operations roles are described as filling fastest, while niche technical and senior positions take longer to staff. This suggests that the supply of available student labour is not matched uniformly to employer demand. Popular categories can create intense competition, while specialised tasks may remain open for longer because they require skills or experience that fewer applicants possess.
The report also identifies a category it calls “smart gigs”, including AI-assisted research, content and prompt-optimisation work, and data-training assignments. These roles indicate that the task economy is not limited to physical errands or service support. It is also absorbing small, specialised pieces of digital work. At the same time, the source does not establish how many students perform such assignments, how frequently they receive them or how much they earn from them. Those gaps limit what can be concluded about the scale of technology-linked student work.
Safety and reliability remain significant questions in a market where tasks are short, employers may be unfamiliar and work can occur outside conventional workplaces. Tim BuckDo says it blocked more than 800 scam job postings during the year. The platform also cites subsidised wellness and accident cover through insurance partner Cover Sure, along with a travel discount arrangement with EaseMyTrip. These measures point to the risks associated with informal work, but the supplied material does not provide details on the number of workers covered, the scope of the insurance or the claims process.
The safety issue is particularly important for assignments involving hospital visits, senior companionship, home support or direct access to personal spaces. Such tasks require more than a digital match. They raise questions about identity checks, emergency contacts, training, consent, accountability and the responsibilities of platforms and clients. The report describes the emergence of these services, but it does not provide an independent assessment of how consistently such safeguards operate.
The broader policy landscape is also not fully established in the source material. The report cites projections that India’s overall gig workforce could reach 2.4 crore, or 24 million, by 2030, with greater use of AI-assisted matching and faster hiring cycles. It does not, however, explain the methodology behind that projection or specify how many workers would belong to student-focused task platforms. Nor does the supplied material detail the applicable labour protections, municipal role or regulatory framework for services involving companionship, caregiving or domestic assistance.
That uncertainty is important because the task economy sits across several institutional boundaries. It concerns employment and income, but also urban care systems, mobility, consumer protection, public safety and the organisation of everyday services. A student accompanying an elderly person to a hospital may be performing a paid task, but the need for that task can also reflect the pressures created by nuclear households, distant family members, long work hours and limited access to affordable care.
Mumbai’s experience therefore offers a view of how cities convert spare time into an informal support network. The platform model makes these services easier to discover and schedule, while students provide a flexible workforce for tasks that are too small, irregular or personal for conventional firms to handle economically. Yet the same model can leave workers dependent on fluctuating demand and clients dependent on systems whose safeguards are still developing.
The evidence currently confirms an expanding range of student gigs and a strong concentration of on-ground work in Mumbai and other large cities. It also shows that the income generated may cover only part of metropolitan living costs and that platform-reported figures require independent scrutiny. What remains unclear is the size of the market beyond one platform, the durability of student participation, the quality of protections available to workers and clients, and the extent to which these services can become a reliable part of urban care and support systems. Those are the questions that will determine whether India’s task economy remains a collection of flexible gigs or develops into a durable layer of city life.
