Human algorithm: OTP Please! reveals hidden emotions of our gig economy

Through voices from across South Asia, OTP Please! uncovers how buyers, workers, sellers and platforms begin to mirror one another in unexpected ways.

Vandana Vasudevan’s OTP Please! may not be the first attempt to capture the gig economy in its entirety, but it approaches it from an angle that makes the shifts it has wrought in our lives more viscerally felt.

A provision in the recently notified labour codes that claims to bring gig workers under the social security net has once again thrown a spotlight on the precarity of this fast-growing category of Indian labour. The sight of these workers — mostly men, zipping about on two-wheelers in brightly coloured uniforms — is now unremarkable. And yet, as recently as 2019, the dependence created by the ability to simply “Swiggy” a meal or “Dunzo” a forgotten item would have been unthinkable.

The rise of the so-called platform economy, especially after its post-pandemic boom, has hardly gone undocumented. Disturbing reports routinely surface from cavernous warehouses and dark stores, where floor workers struggle to meet the swelling volume of demand even as they race to keep up with fulfilment quotas.

We read of delivery “boys” injured or killed in accidents while trying to reach customers within a stipulated time, and of the harassment and abuse that flows both to and from customers. Periodic strikes by divers employed by cab or delivery aggregators may frustrate the many who have come to rely on these services to smooth the jagged edges of modern Indian life. And states such as Rajasthan, Telangana and Karnataka have even extended legislative attention to this sector, seeking to regulate the rights and welfare of these workers who, for all their ubiquity, remain at the margins of the economy.

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Yet these remain fragments — pieces of a puzzle that rarely add up to a sense of the whole.

Vandana Vasudevan’s OTP Please! may not be the first attempt to capture the gig economy in its entirety, but it approaches it from an angle that makes the shifts it has wrought in our lives more viscerally felt. Drawing on data and interviews from across India, as well as Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, Vasudevan shows how the gig economy has reshaped expectations for all who rely on it.

As the narrative moves from buyer to worker to seller to platform, a complex story emerges in which the realities of different players unexpectedly echo one another. Which is why, rather than placing these different moving parts in neat silos, Vasudevan brings them together through nine shared emotions and experiences — pleasure, guilt, anger, freedom, oppression, anxiety, isolation and courage.

This is a thickly-peopled book. We hear from those whom coverage of the gig economy rarely offers space to, such as the dark store manager tasked with hiring 150 riders at the unrealistic rate of 10 a day, so that the company can secure itself against a high employee attrition rate. Or the wheelchair-bound lecturer who has found a lifeline in ride-hailing apps, after years of struggling with unreliable, rashly-driven public buses.

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The sheer number of interviews Vasudevan has done for this book is impressive, even if occasionally, it leads to repetitiveness; what South Asian women have to endure when using public transport, for example, finds space in different chapters (‘Anxiety’ and ‘Courage’).

But that is a minor quibble about what is otherwise a vivid portrait of a South Asian moment shaped by entrepreneurial ferment, low-quality or absent employment, entrenched socioeconomic inequality and an aspiring middle class that seeks services to create the illusion of a higher quality of life.

OTP Please! Online Buyers, Sellers and Gig Workers in South Asia
By Vandana Vasudevan
Penguin, 341pp
Rs 499
pooja.pillai@expressindia.com