The rapid digitalisation of the society has enabled the development of a wide range of platforms which have served the cause of the growing service class and new middle class providing them with more comfort and convenience. Most of them come from the middle classes because the middle classes are more capable of taking benefits of the opportunities that neoliberalism provides (Jha & Pankaj, 2021). The growth of the service sector has been a crucial factor in the development of the Indian middle class (Dickey, 2016; Fernandes, 2006), which has been an instrumental force in the creation of the social circumstances necessary for the decline of the welfare state, which was in synchronisation with the western bourgeois values, that the middle class adhered to in urban India (Chakrabarti, 2010; Chattopadhyay, 2022). The development of the middle class in India was characterised by its growing support for market-driven policies replacing the welfare state which has led to a massive growth of a new kind of middle class. Jha and Pushpendra note:
The post-Liberalisation period [witnessed] the highest rise in the middle segment of the new middle-class households … mainly from the professional and managerial white-collar job holders placed at the mid-level salary brackets, or [from] the business class, have considerable income, mostly [having] more than one earner, are conscious consumerists, and spend a part of their money on maintaining a lifestyle … informed and influenced by advertisements and images of the glitterati (Jha & Pushpendra, 2022, p. 4).
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<sup>21</sup> Footloose labor here refers to those workers who remain unprotected from mainstream labor laws and reforms (such as sick leave, job security, and various forms of social security) and are highly likely to be migrants and/or from marginalized communities (Huws, 2006).