Sanjeev Bikhchandani

🇮🇳🤝🇳🇿 The India-New Zealand FTA marks a people-first, prosperity-first approach to trade - boosting exports, services, and talent mobility while protecting sensitive sectors. With the India-EU pact in the offing, this sets the tone for a new era of balanced trade. In @myfairobserver - fairobserver.com/region/asia_pa… @narendramodi @PiyushGoyal @JitinPrasada

'India’s middle class can now pursue startup ambitions. Govt policy made it possible' Sanjeev Bikhchandani @sbikh, member of the National Startup Advisory Council, in conversation with Rishabh Katiyar #ThePrintOpinion theprint.in/opinion/india-…

Nothing Dickensian about gig work. Plenty transformational. Why India’s platform economy expands livelihoods and worker agency. A data-driven delve with @sbikh in @EconomicTimes

Truth is @raghav_chadha is not defending gig workers; he is auditioning Marxism in public, using delivery riders as moral shields while pushing the same old ideas that have historically ended in disorder, collapse, and state coercion while holding a new prop— broom. What makes this worse is that the business side has already responded rationally. @deepigoyal made valid, measurable, matured arguments: platforms are opt-in, payouts spike on high-demand days, incentives are transparent in aggregate, and participation is voluntary. You can disagree with numbers. You cannot dismiss reality by screaming “exploitation” every time data doesn’t suit ideology. Yet that is exactly what is being done. The moment facts enter the room, Marxism storms out and returns with metaphors. “Hostages with helmets.” “Pressure, not trust.” “Zamindari in digital form.” This is classic case of agitprop. And it follows the oldest communist template: First, deny agency. If a worker chooses to work, Marxism says it wasn’t a choice. Second, deny mobility. If he stays, it must be desperation. Third, criminalise profit. If a company survives, it must be immoral. Finally, delegitimise the system; so chaos looks like justice. It is no less than intellectual arson. The zamindari comparison alone should disqualify this entire sermon. Zamindari was hereditary, legally enforced servitude backed by violence. Gig work is contractual, reversible, competitive, and non-exclusive. A zamindar’s peasant could not quit. A bonded labourer could not switch masters. A gig worker can log out tonight, join another platform tomorrow, or leave the sector entirely. To equate the two is not is historical forgery and outright lie. Then comes the breathtaking hypocrisy. A man sitting in a system with zero performance metrics, no ratings, no algorithmic accountability, guaranteed perks, and near-total job security lectures people who live daily under competition about “pressure.” Yet somehow markets are “cruel” and politics of broom is “moral.” Opacity? Please. Political parties are among the most opaque labour structures on earth;tickets decided behind closed doors, loyalty valued over competence, dynasties protected from competition. No gig worker has ever been told his livelihood depends on pleasing a high command. Politicians are. And let’s be clear about where this road leads. This rhetoric is not about safety or dignity. It is about delegitimising private enterprise itself. Marxism cannot tolerate functioning markets, because functioning markets expose its central lie; that workers are helpless without the state. So the goal is not better regulation. The goal is permanent outrage, constant strikes, and institutional distrust. In other words: anarchy first, control later. History has already tested this ideology; in every language, continent, and costume. The result was always the same: productivity collapsed, black markets flourished, workers became poorer, and power concentrated in the hands of the state. Marxism has never produced dignity. It has only redistributed misery while pretending it was justice. The irony is brutal. The same people condemning platforms enjoy the convenience, speed, and affordability those platforms created. They want capitalism’s outcomes while burning capitalism’s engine. If they were honest, they would demand nationalisation and state-run delivery. We already know how that ends; queues, shortages, corruption, and collapse. Workers deserve fair rules, insurance, and grievance redressal. What they do not deserve is to be weaponised for a 19th-century ideology that failed spectacularly in the 20th and has nothing to offer the 21st except slogans and unrest. Calling capitalism exploitative is easy. Building prosperity is hard. Destroying systems with moral hysteria is easiest of all. And history is very clear about which path leads to dignity; and which leads to ruin.

This sudden moral panic over the “exploitation” of gig workers; performed theatrically by a familiar cast of politicians and buddhijeevis; deserves some retrospection. So let me drag into daylight a fraternity that perfected exploitation long before apps, algorithms, or delivery bikes ever existed: architecture. I chose architecture chasing a rare synthesis, art with discipline, creativity anchored in physics and mathematics. For a lower-middle-class kid, it looked like a profession of dignity: hard work rewarded by skill, imagination rewarded by merit. Reality announced itself early. In the middle of a first-year ragging session, a drunk senior laughed and said: “Even if you dance naked, you won’t get ₹20,000 as a fresher architect.” It sounded crude but he had uttered a truth. Between 2006 and 2011, I spent ₹3–4 lakhs just on stationery, prints, models. Nights bled into mornings in studios. I once sat for 32 continuous hours finishing construction drawings. We were told this was character building. But in reality it was normalization of abuse spelled in romantic language. One of India’s most celebrated architects’ office offered a stipend of ₹500 a month. Another suggested I should work for free; because, apparently, I owed them gratitude for the privilege of learning. I declined both and joined a “mediocre” firm instead, where I worked day and night for a stipend barely enough to go home during festivals. Deepawali? Working day. Because suffering, you see, was a virtue. In Bengaluru, things matured. ₹20,000 a month. Thirteen- to fifteen-hour workdays. Leaving the studio before 11:00 pm felt rebellious. If we missed the 11:30 pm food outlet, we walked 3.5 km back to a makeshift terrace studio in BTM. Miss the 9 am reporting time next morning? Quarter-day salary cut. The sermon was constant: “This is the age to slog. You’ll thank us later.” This misery was systemic. Across firms. Across cities. Across generations. And almost every architect who presided over this cruelty claimed; loudly; to be a socialist. Champions of the poor. Professional mourners of inequality. On public platforms, they wailed about capitalism, cursed right-wing governments, blamed GDP figures, and lectured the nation on ethics. One such chief architect at an MNC even declared that Bangladesh was more prosperous than Bharat and that people like Adani and Ambani were destroying the country. Yet when I asked for a justified increment; after increasing departmental business by 300% post-COVID; he responded with bad humour and moral posturing. Equality for speeches. Austerity only for employees. Today, this very ecosystem is clutching pearls over comments made by @deepigoyal, echoing the freshly rehearsed Marxism of @raghav_chadha . Suddenly, exploitation is a sin. Suddenly, markets are immoral. Suddenly, entrepreneurs are villains. The irony is obscene. Architecture graduates spend five years, lakhs of rupees, and their youth; only to be paid below India’s per-capita income, while working longer hours than most gig workers ever will. Firm owners upgrade cars, collect awards, host conferences on “inclusive cities”; yet ensure that the very people creating their success live without dignity, savings, or future. And then comes the audacity: to lecture a man whose idea built an ecosystem that employed lakhs; many without elite degrees, without capital, without inherited privilege. What did you create? A culture where mediocrity wears moral superiority like a badge. Where true exploitation is rebranded as mentorship. Where ambition is humiliated, and suffering is fetishized. And where the loudest critics of capitalism behave like feudal lords the moment they hold power. History will remember it for what it truly is: the organized defense of mediocrity; and the systematic disrespect of talent; innovation, and those who escaped your cartel of calibrated misery.