In mid-nineteenth century Karl Marx talked about the ‘reserve army of labour’: a pool of workers who are kept in absolute readiness. But for Capital, they are disposable based on fluctuating needs. Their utility is not limited only in economics. Their vulnerability pushes them to accept lower wages which in result weakens the bargaining position of those already employed. Consequently, it gives capital its fundamental advantage over labour. In the words of Marx, they are ‘a mass of human material always ready for exploitation.’This is almost the story of migrant gig workers in contemporary India. Recently, a 21-year-old food delivery boy Pandav Kumar, originally from Khagariya, Bihar was shot dead in the early morning of April 27 in Delhi’s Jaffarpur Kalan village. He was coming from a child’s birthday gathering. The accused killer is a Delhi police head constable. He fired at Pandav at close range after some altercation. Eyewitnesses said the constable began with the words ‘You are Bihari, leave from here’ and then followed other casteist abuses. Pandav was the only earning member of his family.On the surface, his death can be seen as a result of a crime. There has been an arrest. There will be a trial. But treating this merely as a crime overlooks the background structure of it, the role identity and citizenship play in the Indian urban space. Pandav Kumar’s murder is not an aberration. It is a product of that order.Republic of casual labourIndia has between 600 and 650 million internal migrants, a number which puts internal migration at the centre of Indian society. Bihar itself sends out, to other Indian states, some 25 million workers, the second largest out-migration in the country, after Uttar Pradesh. These are not examples of voluntary migration, as that term is commonly applied. Bihar has the lowest per capita GDP of any major state (Rs 69,321 annually, one-third of the national average). More than 33% of the people are multidimensionally poor. Labourers travel because they believe the risks of remaining are greater than the risks of travelling away. They don’t simply go to the city. It is an imperative they face.In Delhi, 60% of the workforce is thought to be migrant. Delhi’s buildings are constructed, the streets are laid, the sewage infrastructure is maintained, the food is delivered by workers from Bihar, Jharkhand, eastern Uttar Pradesh, Odisha and West Bengal. They come, they serve, but are given hardly any right to the city. They live in unauthorised colonies or in their employer’s housing, which can be withdrawn at any moment. They labour in dangerous conditions and wage discrepancy is very common. They are, as the sociology of migration literature would have it, “included by being excluded”: critical to the urban economy, excluded from the urban social order.Also read: Engineers, Journalists, Students: The Faces Behind UP Police’s Arrests in Noida Workers’ ProtestThis is not an accident. It is a design. This informal nature of migrant labour is not a stepping-stone to formality. Informal labour costs less, is easier to manage and cheaper to lay off. Building contractors employed 26.5 million more workers in the decade from 2000 to 2010, commonly binding their workers with wage advances and indebtedness. It is the same patron-client relations of the rural order but now in an urban-industrial context. The city promised to be different. But it is not.Safety as a class privilegeWorkers’ safety in Indian cities is never a policy priority. Gig workers are simply at the end of it. There is no systematic organised data on workers’ safety for informal workers and gig workers. Construction workers fall to their deaths from building accidents at frequencies that do not regularly provoke official action. Sanitation workers, many of them migrant Dalits, go into sewers and septic tanks without safety equipment and suffocate to death. This is partially captured by the National Crime Records Bureau. Most of it goes undocumented.The gig economy has added a new level of insecurity into this. NITI Aayog put the number of platform workers in India at 7.7 million in 2020; it has risen considerably. Delivery persons work at night, travel long distances and find themselves on a road accident waiting to happen. They don’t have accident insurance which covers loss of income, or sick leave, or employers accountable in case of any mishaps. Four states (Rajasthan, Karnataka, Bihar, and Jharkhand) legislated social security for app-based workers in 2023 and 2025. It is a beginning. It does not change the rest of the country (the remaining 24 states, and the national-level labour codes.)Street safety is another major concern. The migrant worker is visible only as a worker. His/her presence in any other capacity, at a birthday function, on the street corner after midnight, relaxing in an area not marked as his/her, is an encroachment. This is more than just anecdotal. Anti-Bihari prejudice in Indian metro cities has a history: MNS activists taking to the streets to beat up North Indian labourers in Mumbai in 2008, a Bihari student at Delhi University attacked by his peers who told him “Things don’t work your way here,” a former Delhi Chief Minister who claimed that Bihari migrants are a burden on the infrastructure. The emotion is mostly socially acceptable and many times it becomes lethal.When ‘Bihari’ becomes a slurWhen the word ‘Bihari’ is used in the social settings of metro cities in India, it is a way of signalling a composite identity that includes class, caste and geographic illegitimacy. Not all ‘Biharis’ are told to leave. A bureaucrat, a minister or an actor are not part of that ‘Bihari’. The victim is always the delivery worker, the construction labourer, or the domestic worker. Research on the migration of Biharis shows that the vast majority of them come from Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe and lower OBC backgrounds. When ‘Bihari’ is used as an insult, it is about a caste and class stigma.This has some similarities (but is not the same) with the discrimination suffered by people from north-eastern states of India in metro cities. North-eastern people experience racial and ethnic othering. Their bodies are racialised as outsiders and they are perceived as non-Indian. They are seen as anomalies in certain urban locations. Bihari migrants experience caste and class othering: their class location, signified through accent, job, neighbourhood and bodily placement, is of a lower status. The form of exclusion differs. The result, a labourer whose humanity the city is unwilling to acknowledge, is the same. Both of these patterns reflect the same material reality: that Indian urban citizenship is divided by class and caste and some have fewer rights and a lesser claim.When Marx said capital needs a disposable human surplus, this is what he was pointing at. They are not just an economic category. This is ideological work that makes certain lives seem less worth protecting, certain bodies more expendable.What the moment demandsMay Day and Marx’s birthday have just passed. Both occasions are celebrated by those whose political tradition comes from labour history. Unfortunately, the most appropriate descendants of that tradition, Pandav Kumar and his colleagues, are mostly busy surviving each day.In the current institutional set-up, the answer to Pandav Kumar’s death is inconvenient. The labour codes enacted since 2020 claimed to streamline existing law but did not substantially expand protections for informal workers. The new platform economy expands using the model of classified self-employment that exempts companies from responsibility to workers. Urban local bodies have no say on migrant workers’ interests.Also read: Delhi’s Heat Is Oppressive. For Home-Based Workers It is WorseGreater enforcement of the law in situations like Pandav Kumar’s is important, but what is needed is something more. It is the enforcing of what migrant workers “deserve”: labour inspections that extend to the informal economy; social security systems that are applicable across state borders; treating migrants as citizens and not as transitory workers; a public culture that recognises caste-class discrimination in the city not as an occasional law-and-order problem.It’s important that these conversations start immediately, not resurface only after a tragic death and then die down. Marx, for his part, would not have been surprised that they haven’t been. He’d already explained why.Himadri Sekhar Mistri is a researcher at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University, working on political violence, social movements and contemporary democracies.Sanjiv Kumar is a PhD candidate at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University, working on culture and labour.