The Economy Built On The Unseen: The Haunting Human Cost Of India’s Need For Instant Everything
- IJLLR Journal
- 5 minutes ago
- 2 min read
Mihika Shetty, St. Joseph College of Law
ABSTRACT
Shadowing the 10-minute promise, life is being squeezed, stretched, and worn down without any noise. The ultra-fast delivery economy depends on being very close to the customer, but it can only do that because it is built on the exhaustion, invisibility, and slow destruction of human endurance of those who bring the delivery. Workers run through streets, ride under incessant pressure, get injuries without treatment, skip meals, and sacrifice their sleep - all to meet the deadlines that are measured in seconds. Their bodies are the tools, their work is invisible, and their lives are the victims in a system that values speed more than dignity. Algorithms determine worth; corporate strategies order compliance; the law is behind, helpless and unreal, a weak sound against the suffering of those who make this economy possible.
This document delves into the concealed network of exploitation that is implanted in India's instant delivery industry, revealing how the unregulated areas, the corporate imperatives, and the structural pressures merge to make risk, fatigue, and danger normal. Under the neon-bright convenience facades is a grid of human cost that the society chooses not to see. Profit is taken from disappearance; immediacy is paid for with broken bodies; labor rights and legal protections are only there in theory and cannot meet the reality of the relentless work of those who have to work.
The instant delivery economy is not a victory of efficiency, rather it is the architecture of disappearance. It is a system where human dignity is sacrificed to speed, where suffering is not seen but it is there all the time, and where the law, conscience, and empathy are all behind the industrial urgency. This research deals with the unsettling truth: a society that cannot live without convenience may be complicit in the normalization of human suffering, and the ones who are not seen carry the heaviest burden. By mapping the exploitation, this document attempts to reveal what is hidden on purpose, to make visible the lives that are compressed and consumed in the pursuit of instant gratification, and to ask if any calculation of efficiency can ever be a reason for the annihilation of human existence.
Keywords: exhaustion, invisibility, algorithmic pressure, human cost, structural exploitation, sacrificed dignity, disappearance.
