Scenario One: An altercation between a commuter and an auto-rickshaw driver turns ugly. A beat officer intervenes, gives the rickshaw driver a dressing down, punctuated by the choicest of abuses, perhaps even slaps him, at the same time also pacifies the angry passenger. They go their own way.
Scenario Two: Ditto. Till the cop arrives. This time the intervention is somewhat more clinical, economy is exercised in verbal and physical violence. But the cop marches the auto driver to a police station and his tale of woes begins.
About two weeks ago, a version of Scenario Two played out in Bengaluru. The city police arrested an auto-rickshaw driver for allegedly assaulting a woman, a young student, after she cancelled the ride on his vehicle. A video of the confrontation, which the student posted on X, quickly went viral, provoking polarised opinions. A section of people turned the issue into one of linguistic antagonism, a matter of Kannada pride — the young commuter had argued in Hindi — and tried to mobilise funds for the driver’s bail. A different section went ballistic over money being arranged for a person who had assaulted a woman. Important questions over women’s safety have been raised.
In this social media conversation, however, another player in the episode has, at best, received cursory attention — the ride hailing app, used by the student. In the rush hour hurry, she is reported to have used more than one phone to book two autos, eventually cancelling the one slated to reach later. The driver, who lost out, was incensed.
Ride hailing — or delivery services — apps are today among the most ubiquitous features of the urban gig economy. In a fast-paced world, they are, in several ways, much-needed convenience for the customer. With a few clicks on the smartphone, a car or auto rickshaw can arrive in a matter of minutes. People can book courier services, get groceries delivered at their front door, or schedule a ride without having to negotiate — or haggle — with a shopkeeper or a cab driver. The app is geared towards making the arrangement impersonal. The student, by all accounts, was interacting primarily with an automated system — a mechanism designed to distance the commuter from the driver, even make her impervious to their experiences. Interactions in this algorithm-mediated universe, where almost everyone is a consumer of technology, seem to have very little space for the Bengaluru driver’s claim that he spent precious time and fuel in travelling seven kilometres to reach the commuter.
The driver — or the delivery service provider — on paper is a “partner” for the aggregator, a self-employed person, an entrepreneur of sorts. Anyone with a vehicle and a licence can turn their asset into a venture. Drivers decide when and for how long they will be connected to the platform receiving passenger calls. The driver also has the option to reject a ride. But that’s where the “entrepreneurial” autonomy ends. From the moment the worker turns on the app until the moment it’s turned off, the work is controlled by the platform. Offered a ride, they have scarcely any time to respond, gauge distance, and the remuneration — because for the most part, drivers must be passive respondents to the platform’s instruction. The app tracks their location, speed, and acceptance rate of customer requests. They have a maximum number of services they can refuse. How much the customer pays and how much of that goes to the driver are determined by an algorithm. The platform knows a lot about the drivers while its ways are opaque to them. At times, the app appears a champion manipulator — studies, for example, have shown that Uber has drawn insights from behavioural sciences to “nudge” drivers to work longer hours. In any case, it’s no rocket science that with the economy not providing enough jobs for dignified livelihoods, people will be pushed into longer and more strenuous gigs. Managed by a faceless boss, the driver’s alienation from the system is cemented by the rider’s power to rate the commute. Studies have also shown that virtually nil bargaining power and the feeling of powerlessness breeds negativity in the driver, a lot of which is directed at the commuter.
The Bengaluru student alleged that the auto rickshaw driver snatched her mobile phone and slapped her. Within two days of her social-media post, the driver was arrested. In another world, also fraught with deep inequalities and faultlines, the episode could have perhaps played out differently. With technology not playing middle-man and face-to-face interactions having little more role in quelling fights, there was a chance that the driver would have been reprimanded severely, made to apologise to the student and the skirmish would have ended there: A version of Scenario One, still not a perfect solution, for questions over women’s safety and mobility would have remained, while the driver too wouldn’t have received a sympathetic hearing.
What transpired in Bengaluru, however, seemed like an episode of the TV show Black Mirror playing out in real life. Some good Samaritans did pool-in money for the driver’s bail – Rs 30,000. But after his release from jail on Tuesday, the driver found himself blacklisted by ride-hailing platforms. The jury is still out on how much of the injury to the driver’s livelihood is algorithm-driven and how much of the cancelling is the doing of the whiz kids managing the app.
kaushik.dasgupta@expressindia.com
