Liberating India's Poor and Unemployed
It's not enough for gig platforms to be profitable. It's not enough that they sell convenience. They must be proudly defended for their emancipation of the poor, the uneducated and the unemployed.
My dog hates electric scooters. Nothing else can come within inches of her without making a sound, and that annoys her to no end. Whatever noise it does make is a high pitched whine like a dog whistle. Every time one gets too close, she lunges at it snarling and growling. The riders grin stupidly and drive away, as my dog almost tears my arm off trying to chase them down. I calmly shake my head at her, telling her that it's her fault. She could have been paying better attention to the road instead of walking with her nose glued to the ground.
I started driving when my dog was a year old, and some of her contempt for electric scooters started creeping into me. I came to understand why she hates them so much. Maybe getting mad at them for quietly invading her space is perhaps not her fault at all. It's not just the noise - it's the riders too. Like my dog, even the riders are rarely looking at the road. They're always looking at their phones, at house numbers, at people standing on the first and second floor balconies - anywhere but the road. In traffic, they're straight-up reckless. They accelerate too fast and brake too hard. They sway from side to side, jump read lights and don't hesitate to drive on the wrong side of the road. If you indicate you want to turn left or right, they'll end up in your blind spot with remarkable precision. Every time I yell an obscenity at them while driving, I can feel my dog rolling her eyes at me. There was a time when dogs had a peculiar disdain for postmen, now they have it for delivery boys1 executives.
Strangely, all of that becomes irrelevant when they bring me stuff. It doesn't matter how many vehicles they've cut off or how many dogs they've annoyed. I'm never anything but polite to a stranger who brings me food. I make it a point to address them by name, I thank them and tip them. If it's too hot, I ask them if they want some water. If it’s raining, I tell them that they're welcome to wait the bad weather out in my verandah. This irritates my dog even more, she’s the sovereign of the verandah. Her eyes show a clear sense of betrayal.
The point is that my attitude towards gig workers is a fairly uniform distribution of emotions - scattered evenly between generosity and irritation. And I'm sure that's how most people treat them. Most people are... just regular humans: kind, generous, irritable and angry in equal measure. The polite will look them in the eye and smile at them. The sociable will strike conversations with cab drivers in a new city; the tardy will ask them to jump traffic lights. The indecisive will ask waiters for recommendations and the large-hearted will tip generously.
But one particular species of humans, the 'influencers', are a different breed entirely. They can't let so much as a fly buzz past without photographing it and captioning it on social media with a motivational quote.
Social media has a peculiar relationship with gig workers. On the one hand, it’s a good place to complain about the workers' unprofessionalism, laziness or downright criminality. On the other hand, social media virtually worships their hustle. We all have this fantasy of being a liberated, empowered gig worker - someone who can decide their own hours and make theoretically infinite money. For those of us who take our job security, labour rights and social security benefits for granted - the fantasy is all the more appealing.
But the most interesting reactions towards gig workers are about how they are emancipated by startups. It's not enough for LinkedIn influencers that companies exist for profit - even though, arguably, that alone is a morally and economically justifiable reason for startups to exist. Even if startups are successful, their unappointed champions must find a reason to justify their existence, preferably one that works well with unnecessary jingoism.
One such example came from a gentleman who's very happy that Vijay Shekhar Sharma prefers to use flamboyant designations like "Indian Digital Services Members" instead of "gig workers". I wouldn't entirely blame VSS either - whatever image the phrase "gig worker" invokes in your mind, it's certainly not likely to be dignified. Notice the hashtags in the post. Words like “#viksitbharat”, “#aadhar”, “#digitaleconomy”, etc, have been woven into the post with such flourish that it almost seems like all of India's problems are solved with startups.
However, when you put the chest-thumping aside, the OP does seem to have a good point. They say that UPI, Aadhar and the India Stack have changed the way we transact and work. That's true - they have. They say that there are pros and cons to everything, and that we shouldn't always dwell on the negatives. There are, and we shouldn't. But for some inexplicable reason, these, apparently, are things that cannot be said without embellishment. And it's in this tadka of nationalism that even the most well-meaning people get carried away.
And there, as the Bard says, is the rub.
The Newer Colossus: India’s Platform Economy
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
(From the sonnet by Emma Lazarus, inscribed on the Statue of Liberty)
The OP mentions that they lived in Dehradun between 2009 and 2015, where they witnessed "frequent strikes at Gandhi Park... mostly by unemployed youth, including fresh graduates and dropouts", and that "today such strikes are rare." Sadly, a quick search on Google News reveals that protests at Gandhi Park are all but rare. And the most prominent of them in the recent past was indeed held by "unemployed youth" who were demanding a CBI probe into recruitment scams and action against paper leaks.
Poor students... if only they'd known that the gig economy has been waiting for them with open arms! Sure, they'll have to wear uncomfortable uniforms and deal with the lack of a written contract, job security or other benefits that come with being "employees", but that's still better than being eyesores in Gandhi Park. Unemployed youth need to get with the times.
I don't blame the OP for not knowing what's happening in Gandhi Park since 2015 - especially since they moved out of Dehradun, and availability bias is something that affects the best of us. I wouldn't even blame them for moving out of Dehradun precisely a year before demonetisation, after which VSS's Paytm rocketed in popularity, and changed many lives including that of the OP. Remember how petrol pumps used to discourage the use of mobile phones because they were thought to be unsafe? But, as soon as the demonetization was announced, Paytm rendered all petrol pumps in the country safe from mobile phones overnight. Masterstroke! Changing lives, truly…
The OP's other claims are not so easily falsifiable2. For example, they claim that "many who once faced barriers like lack of education or technical skills, now earn ₹15,000 to ₹45,000 or even more." For claims like these, which fall squarely in the category of not even wrong, we can't use anecdotal evidence or newspaper reports. We need solid primary data. Unfortunately, it's nearly impossible to get anything very reliable about the gig workforce from existing surveys. For starters, there is no legal definition of what constitutes gig work, or that of a gig worker. Sources like the Periodic Labour Force Survey provide proxies based on which individual respondents may be singled out as gig workers, but that too would be approximate. In fact, until recently there have been very few enthusiastic moves by the government, corporate lobbyists or even the civil society to codify the gig workforce within India's labour law.
A bill was introduced in the Lok Sabha in 2020 - The Code on Social Security, 2020 which has an entire chapter on gig work, which proposed that the central government shall formulate and notify welfare schemes for gig workers. Labour experts like Prof Babu Mathew allege, however, that what's crept into the bill is the aggregators' definition of a gig worker. For instance, the bill states that the aggregator should pay no more than 5% of the amount payable to a worker towards social security or other benefits. Prof Mathew calls it a "half-hearted and inadequate attempt". Rajasthan remains the only state to enact a law that provides for the welfare of gig workers, but the law is yet to be brought into force. The Telangana and Karnataka governments appear to be making progressive steps towards this cause too3.
As much as gig workers stand to lose from lobbying, they stand to lose more from the misclassification of their work. No aggregator wants them as employees. Most don't even qualify as contractors. It's because of this that we find ourselves in a strange situation - surveys, policies and studies do include gig workers, but only in the aggregate. There's virtually no way to filter them out from the rest of the workforce. For example, the PLFS divides the population into 4 categories - self-employed, regular wage/salaried employees, casual labourers and finally those that are not a part of the workforce. Where in these categories do gig workers fit? They could self-report as being self-employed or even as casual labourers. There are also a lot of people who have full time jobs but perform gig work for side-income.
All in all, there's no way to disambiguate a gig worker. Until disaggregated estimates of the gig workforce are not obtained, social media will continue to adore their hustle and praise platforms for saving them from eternal damnation - all while remaining oblivious to their reality.
Estimating India’s Gig Workforce
Even if surveys like the PLFS don't give us clear indicators of the gig workforce, they're still the most comprehensive source we have on the matter. PLFS employs a rotating sampling panel design which collects data from individuals and households throughout the year, accounting for seasonality and bolstered by the very robust methods of the NSS.
In addition, there's a 2022 report from NITI Aayog which provides helpful guidelines as to which PLFS respondents are likely to be gig workers. These guidelines allow us to apply filters of age, education, occupation, industry to the PLFS data in order to approximate the gig workforce. For example, gig workers are likely to be largely urban, between 18 to 45 years old, and come from households that lie under the 75th percentile of monthly per-capita expenditure (in other words, the poorest three-fourths of the population). The basic categories of work (self-employed, regular wage/salaried employees, casual labourers) are still included in this filtered subset of the data, but we can more easily cross-reference them against education and monthly income.
This view of PLFS (filtered down to the individuals likely to be representative of the gig workforce) allows us to move the OP's claim about education and income away from an unfalsifiable claim to something that can be very broadly verified. And credit where it's due - the OP's estimate of the lower bound of income (Rs 15,000) does fall comfortably within the range of incomes. The upper bound of Rs 45,000, however seems quite out of reach. And even those who "faced barriers like lack of education or technical skills" are not all that worse off, at least among men. Regardless of education, there doesn't seem to be much evidence that digital platforms are lifting people out of poverty.
Trolling as a Public Service
The OP aren't the first person to make tall claims about the gig economy with a side of jingoism, and they won't be the last. There seems to be a pattern to how people like these come swarming out of the bushes to defend a misplaced ideal. That pattern, I can't help but think, is Kunal Kamra.
Kamra made a documentary about the troubles of gig workers4 and released it last August. Then, five months later on New Years Day, Albinder Dhindsa tweeted that lakhs of condoms, thousands of cans of tonic water and hundreds of lighters were en-route to be delivered in the next ten minutes. Kamra quoted him and asked how much the delivery partners were making. Dhindsa later deleted his tweet, but his unappointed champions were still hard at work.
Kamra did it earlier to Bhavish Aggarwal, too. On both occasions, people were quick to point out that Kamra was just trolling. We're not prepared for a reality where satire is a better delivery mechanism for news than whatever abomination passes for mainstream media. A comedian defending workers' rights is more bizarre to us than a newsperson’s naked and blatant destruction of journalistic standards. Trolls should have no business doing anything but trolling (except when the troll is Piyush Goyal - if you’re him, you can say what Kamra says and get away with it).
Let’s not forget the other kind of troll - the dim-witted, but dangerous mythical creature. The Witcher video games and books feature some very entertaining troll encounters. Geralt’s interactions with trolls (and other sentient “monsters”) are the most enjoyable part of the game. Even in the Witcher books, trolls are very complex creatures. This conversation from The Last Wish shows the role trolls play in the world of the Witcher:
…under that bridge sits a troll and demands every passerby pays him. Those who refuse have a leg injured, sometimes both. So I go to the alderman: “How much will you give me for that troll?” He’s amazed. “What are you talking about?” he asks, “Who will repair the bridge if the troll’s not there? He repairs it regularly with the sweat of his brow, solid work, first rate. It’s cheaper to pay his toll.
Saying “delivery boys” comes more naturally to someone accustomed to hearing phrases like “ladka nikal gaya hai”.
Karl Popper would have ignored an unfalsifiable claim entirely, but where’s the fun in that!?
The Telangana government is currently accepting suggestions on their draft bill about registration, social security and welfare of gig workers. The Karnataka cabinet has recently approved a similar bill, and is expected to be enacted into law.
A remarkably restrained, apolitical and uncontroversial documentary, very unlike his standup material.