Mobilisation in the Platform Economy: The Case of App-Based Taxi Services in India

Abstract

Uber and Ola were launched in Indian cities a decade ago. This past decade has seen an unparalleled transformation of how the Indian public, its municipal governance bodies and the state as a regulatory body imagine city commute and public transportation in our cities. The much-celebrated introduction of the aggregators in the taxi sector of Indian cities, marketed as ‘disruption’, is a reality comprised of varied implications on the public, on the taxi drivers, on the municipal bodies and the state. In this article, based on the author’s decade-long engagement with the taxi sector-aggregator and the metered taxi, the paper focuses on the story of the taxi men onboard with the(se) platform(s), the multiplicity of collectives and unions as a result of their mobilisations. The article then pushes to discuss the challenges in their collective actions with respect to the aggregator companies to argue that this new form of work, that is, work in the platform economy, is leading to an emergence of a novel pattern of collective organisation and action for impactful resistance and dialogue.