Contemporary urban India is characterised by an increasing number of platform-based services which are presenting a new way for people to experience the urban space. These developments are considered to be parts of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), which is one of the most highly contested terms across the globe. The constantly increasing platform-based gig work is intimately related to the gradual deskilling of the workers, which shares a dialectical relationship with workers’ rural-to-urban migration and the capitalist imagination of the urban space. Migrants are increasingly becoming a dominant part of certain sections of the gig economy, such as delivery work, fuelled by a constant devaluation of labour under monopoly capitalism where it is desirable that workers become replaceable and represent nothing more than dehumanised parts of the giant capitalist machine itself. The current paper looks at migrant gig delivery workers in three Indian cities, Delhi, Bengaluru and Hyderabad. It analyses their everyday lives and brings out their struggles for sustenance in light of the growing digitalisation of the overall urban experiential lived space. The paper focuses on thirty interviews conducted with migrant delivery workers, and brings forward the choices that these gig workers have to make in the cities to sustain and get cared for, which again are dominated by the implications of the entire labour process involved in delivery work along with the effects that it has on their Right to the City.

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Migrant Gig Workers of India’s Consumerist Cities: The Contradictions of Platform Economy and Delivery Work in Neoliberal India

  • Suddhabrata Deb Roy

摘要

Contemporary urban India is characterised by an increasing number of platform-based services which are presenting a new way for people to experience the urban space. These developments are considered to be parts of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), which is one of the most highly contested terms across the globe. The constantly increasing platform-based gig work is intimately related to the gradual deskilling of the workers, which shares a dialectical relationship with workers’ rural-to-urban migration and the capitalist imagination of the urban space. Migrants are increasingly becoming a dominant part of certain sections of the gig economy, such as delivery work, fuelled by a constant devaluation of labour under monopoly capitalism where it is desirable that workers become replaceable and represent nothing more than dehumanised parts of the giant capitalist machine itself. The current paper looks at migrant gig delivery workers in three Indian cities, Delhi, Bengaluru and Hyderabad. It analyses their everyday lives and brings out their struggles for sustenance in light of the growing digitalisation of the overall urban experiential lived space. The paper focuses on thirty interviews conducted with migrant delivery workers, and brings forward the choices that these gig workers have to make in the cities to sustain and get cared for, which again are dominated by the implications of the entire labour process involved in delivery work along with the effects that it has on their Right to the City.