Mumbai houses Bollywood, the same Bollywood whose films are made on budgets running into hundreds of crores. Those films go on to earn over a thousand crores, or at the very least a few hundred crores. Some of the top Bollywood actors demand fees ranging from double digits to triple digits, again in crores.
But what about the crew members, the people behind the scenes who actually do the painstaking, back-breaking work of getting those movies made?
Turns out the wage disparity and working conditions have gotten so bad that many are quitting the film business to work as gig workers for Swiggy or Ola instead.
These are the same people who light up those scenes that make audiences go ‘wow’ in amazement, who ensure that the hero’s face looks perfect on screen while he sheds that single manly tear. However, these same people are now choosing gig work simply because, compared to what they’ve been putting up with on film sets for decades, it’s the saner option.
Are Bollywood’s Lightmen Quitting Films To Work At Swiggy/Ola?
According to a report by The Hollywood Reporter India, the difficult working conditions that many crew members of the Hindi film industry still endure are pushing them toward alternative jobs.
Gaffer Sajid Shaikh of All Film Equipment, speaking with THR India, said, “Some lightmen are hardcore, specialised technicians who are essential to keep sets safe – it’s directly related to electricity, and therefore to human life. If an efficient person isn’t in charge, a tragedy can happen.
They are specialised technicians, not generic labourers. But because they don’t get paid, many are leaving to become Swiggy and Zomato delivery boys as it pays better and reliably.
It is happening rapidly as we speak. ‘We can’t take this anymore bhai, we have to leave’ – that is what a technician told me recently. Specialised people are walking away simply because they aren’t being compensated.”
Arjun Singh, director of Light Craft and Sound, a leading rental vendor of film equipment, also spoke about the risks the lightmen take versus the abysmal pay they still get. In a social media post, Singh said, “The lightmen who work for us play with risks – they play with live current, which means they are playing with their lives.”
“If we at least increase their wage by just ₹300 to ₹400 for a 12-hour shift, every lightman, every technician will work happily. They will finally get some light in their own lives! This is a request to all producers, not a demand.”
Shaikh also commented on how the working hours of the crew started to change, but not for the better. He said, “It used to be that if there was a 9:00 AM shift, people would arrive at 8:30 AM, have breakfast, and start at 9:00 AM. Gradually, production started taking advantage of it and made that extra hour mandatory.
Then came the ‘grace periods.’ First it was five minutes, then 15, then 45, and now it’s an hour or more of unpaid overtime. A 12-hour shift becomes 15 hours just like that.”
Read More: “Extremely Disrespectful,” Kannada Director Hemanth Rao On IIFA Awards
The Problem With The Mumbai Film Industry
This is not the first time that issues with the crew members of Bollywood films and their toxic working conditions have come forward. In July 2026, a production house named Reelzen Creative posted a multi-part series in which lightmen from the film industry talked about the problems with their work.
View this post on Instagram
In May, Kamil Qureshi, a ‘Bollywood BTS technician’, posted about how “the hard work of Lightmen stays hidden.” The account often posts about the behind-the-scenes of moviemaking, focusing especially on the technicians and crew members who keep working even when the actors are not on set.
View this post on Instagram
In the video, Suraj Gautam, owner of Wide Light in Delhi, explained, “To reach the set on time, I give a call time of 3 am.” He also revealed that despite how physically demanding the job is, they are paid as little as Rs 1,800 for a single shift, regardless of how long it runs.
Freelance lightman Dinesh Bharti said, “We don’t have any fixed hours to start our day. It can be either 2 am or 5 am. In this film industry, lightmen have the most demanding job. Yet they are paid the least.”
Dinesh also explained that overtime is paid only if they work 17 or 18 hours, but not if the shift runs just a few hours past the agreed time.
Even with digital payments, producers delay transfers for weeks or months at a time, according to lightmen quoted in recent reporting – a big downgrade from the era of same-day cash payments.
Then there is the food, divided into “Category A” for directors and actors and “Category B”, visibly worse and served separately, for the lighting crew and spot boys.
Ashraf Sayed, a 64-year-old lightman in the Hindi film industry, was quoted in a 2024 Outlook India report, saying, “Have you heard of Category B food – reserved for lighting and spot boys? The big hierarchies from director to make-up artists have Category A food, which has a variety of meat and vegetables; they are the ones for whom sturdy chairs are made available to sit and eat.
Even their rice granules have a shape. By the time we come down from makeshift cabins built at 30 feet height, where the cranes hold light bulbs, we mostly have to stand as the chairs are all taken by those served Category A food.
Our food is below average and kept separate, served in a different queue. Even the ice cream is sad – it’s runny and water-like. There is this really bad quality daal and the food doesn’t even appeal at times.”
He added, “When it’s time to eat, we often try to ease the situation among us by joking that municipality food has arrived for us, for we are commoners. In the 90s and till a decade ago, all were equal. Everyone made the movie together.”
Sayed’s account of the pandemic years is harrowing. The entire informal crew economy around Mumbai’s Film City essentially collapsed overnight, with almost no institutional support reaching workers who had spent decades keeping productions running.
In his words, describing the industry’s response to that crisis: “Everyone failed us, even the actors who came alive with our lights.”
It is not as if the crew members and workers have not tried to bring about change in the industry. In 2016, roughly 1.5 lakh cine workers under the Federation of Western India Cine Employees (FWICE) – lightmen, spot boys, junior artists, and other technicians among them – went on an indefinite strike demanding better pay and working conditions, shutting down nearly every active shoot in Mumbai.
The result, though, was disappointing. Even after negotiations with producers, the demands set by the workers were never met; the strike was simply called off without any reason given, and the workers went back to the sets like it was any other day.
This kind of unregulated work structure – where even unions are not of much help, and production houses operate on an individual basis with nothing to keep them in check or hold them accountable when something goes wrong – is exactly the problem. It is exactly why the crew members are taken advantage of by producers, who hire them for a pittance while making them do extremely difficult physical labour that can also put their lives at risk.
This phenomenon of lightmen deciding that riding a bike through Mumbai traffic is the better deal compared to a film set says less about the appeal of gig work and more about just how little Bollywood’s informal crew economy has changed in twenty years of people asking it to.
Image Credits: Google Images
Sources: The Hollywood Reporter India, The Hindu, Outlook India
Find the blogger: @chirali_08
This post is tagged under: Bollywood, Mumbai Film Industry, Lightmen, Gig Economy, Swiggy, Ola, Film Crew, Labour Rights, Working Conditions, FWICE, Indian Cinema, Daily Wage Workers, Film Industry Crisis, Workers Rights, Bollywood lightmen quitting jobs, Bollywood crew low pay, Bollywood crew wage problems, spot boys, bollywood spot boys, bollywood technicians
Disclaimer: We do not own any rights or copyrights to the images used; these images have been sourced from Google. If you require credits or wish to request removal, please contact us via email.
Other Recommendations:
Awarapan 2: No Originality Left As Remixes And Sequels Rule Bollywood?
[…] ‘We Can’t Take This Anymore,’ Mumbai Movie Light Men Are Quitting… […]
no they should not