The Centre for Internet and Society
http://editors.cis-india.org
These are the search results for the query, showing results 1 to 15.
Parichiti - Domestic Workers’ Access to Secure Livelihoods in West Bengal
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/parichiti-domestic-workers-access-to-secure-livelihoods-west-bengal
<b>This report by Anchita Ghatak of Parichiti presents findings of a pilot study conducted by the author and colleagues to document the situation of women domestic workers (WDWs) in the lockdown and the initial stages of the lifting of restrictions. This study would not have been possible without the WDWs who agreed to be interviewed for this study and gave their time generously. We are grateful to Dr Abhijit Das of the Centre for Health and Social Justice for his advice and help. The report is edited by Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon, and this work forms a part of the CIS’s project on gender, welfare and surveillance supported by Privacy International, United Kingdom.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Domestic Workers’ Access to Secure Livelihoods in West Bengal: <a href="https://www.parichiti.org.in/ckfinder/userfiles/files/Final%20report_WDW_Lockdown.pdf" target="_blank">Read</a> (PDF)</h4>
<h4>Cross-posted from <a href="https://www.parichiti.org.in/r&p.php" target="_blank">Parichiti</a>.</h4>
<hr />
<h2>Executive Summary</h2>
<p>Hundreds of thousands of women from poor communities work as domestic workers in Kolkata. Domestic work is typically a precarious occupation, with very little recognition in legislation or policy. Along with other workers in the informal economy, women domestic workers (WDWs) were severely impacted by the national lockdown enforced in March, with loss of livelihood and few options for survival.</p>
<p>Parichiti works with WDWs in 20 different locations - slums and informal settlements in Kolkata and villages in south 24 Parganas. We conducted this pilot study from late June to August 2020 to document the situation of WDWs from March onwards, in the lockdown and the initial stages of lifting of restrictions. We interviewed 14 WDWs on the phone to record their experiences during the lockdown and after, including impact on livelihoods. The objectives of the study were to document the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the lives of WDWs, with focus on economic and health dimensions.</p>
<p>We found that most domestic workers in our sample were paid for March, but faced difficulties in procuring wages April onwards. During this period, they faced economic hardships that threatened their survival, with members of their family also involved in the informal sector and experiencing loss of wages. Workers survived on relief received through civil society or by taking loans from banks or informal lenders. Some are now stuck in a debt trap.</p>
<p>Most went back to work from June, but faced several barriers – public transport services continued to be dysfunctional, apartment complexes prohibited entry of outsiders, and employers were reluctant to allow workers into their homes. Employers were wary of workers if they were employed in multiple households or used public transport, forcing workers to adapt to these conditions. Due to these reasons, some workers lost their jobs permanently, while others returned with lower wages or lower number of employers. Workers were well aware of the precautions to be taken at the home and workplace with regards to Covid-19.</p>
<p>Many WDWs were unable to access ration through the Public Distribution System. Some were not enrolled and others were enrolled in the districts they had migrated from. Some were not classified as below the poverty line and were hence not priority households for the state, although they were ‘deserving’ beneficiaries. All of the respondents were affected by Cyclone Amphan, which devastated parts of the state in May 2020. Despite the announcement of a sizeable compensation by the state, those whose homes were impacted were unable to get any relief. WDWs overall tended to not rely on the state for welfare or health services. Many regarded public health systems to have poor quality services, and turned to private services when possible. Both central and state governments fell short of meeting the needs of WDWs during the pandemic, which could potentially have long-term impact on their income and health.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/parichiti-domestic-workers-access-to-secure-livelihoods-west-bengal'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/parichiti-domestic-workers-access-to-secure-livelihoods-west-bengal</a>
</p>
No publisherAnchita GhatakGig WorkResearchNetwork EconomiesPublicationsGender, Welfare, and PrivacyResearchers at Work2020-12-30T10:01:36ZBlog EntryData Lives of Humanities Text
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/data-lives-of-humanities-text
<b>The ‘computational turn’ in the humanities has brought with it several questions and challenges for traditional ways of engaging with the ‘text’ as an object of enquiry. The prevalence of data-driven scholarship in the humanities offers several challenges to traditional forms of work and practice, with regard to theory, tools, and methods. In the context of the digital, ‘text’ acquires new forms and meanings, especially with practices such as distant reading. Drawing upon excerpts from an earlier study on digital humanities in India, this essay discusses how data in the humanities is not a new phenomenon; concerns about the ‘datafication’ of humanities, now seen prominently in digital humanities and related fields is actually reflective of a longer conflict about the inherited separation between humanities and technology. It looks at how ‘data’ in the humanities has become a new object of enquiry as a result of several changes in the media landscape in the past few decades. These include large-scale digitalization and availability of corpora of materials (digitized and born-digital) in an array of formats and across varied platforms, thus leading to also a steady prevalence of the use of computational methods in working with and studying cultural artifacts today. This essay also explores how reading ‘text as data’ helps understand the role of data in the making of humanities texts and redefines traditional ideas of textuality, reading, and the reader.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>This essay by Puthiya Purayil Sneha was published in <em>Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India</em> (2020) edited by Sandeep Mertia, with a Foreword by Ravi Sundaram as part of the Series on Theory on Demand by Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam.</h4>
<h4>Read the open access book <a href="https://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/lives-of-data-essays-on-computational-cultures-from-india/" target="_blank">here</a>.</h4>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/data-lives-of-humanities-text'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/data-lives-of-humanities-text</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppResearchResearchers at WorkPublicationsDigital Humanities2020-12-23T13:07:43ZBlog EntryFrom Health and Harassment to Income Security and Loans, India's Gig Workers Need Support
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/gig-workers-need-support
<b>Deemed an 'essential service' by most state governments, and thereby exempt from temporary suspension during the COVID-19 lockdown, food, groceries and other essential commodities have continued to be delivered by e-commerce companies and on-demand services. Actions to protect workers, who are taking on significant risks, have been far less forthcoming than those for customers. Zothan Mawii (Tandem Research), Aayush Rathi (CIS) and Ambika Tandon (CIS) spoke with the leaders of four workers' unions and labour researchers to identify recommended actions that public agencies and private companies may undertake to better support the urgent needs of gig workers in India. </b>
<p> </p>
<p><em>Originally published by <a href="https://thewire.in/business/covid-19-lockdown-delivery-gig-workers" target="_blank">The Wire</a> on April 29, 2020.</em></p>
<hr />
<p>Nearly two weeks ago, news broke that a Zomato delivery worker <a href="https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/delhi/pizza-man-who-tested-covid-19-positive-also-delivered-food-for-us-zomato-6365513/" target="_blank">tested positive for COVID-19</a> in New Delhi.</p>
<p>As many as 72 families in the south Delhi neighbourhood where he made deliveries have been quarantined, along with 17 other people he worked with. With the luxury of social distancing not extended to delivery workers, the incident further fuelled the apprehensions and uncertainties that they already were contending with. This was only a matter of time.</p>
<p>Deemed an “essential service” by most state governments, and thereby exempt from temporary suspension during the lockdown, food, groceries and other essential commodities have continued to be delivered by e-commerce companies and on-demand services including Swiggy, Zomato, BigBasket, Dunzo, Housejoy and Flipkart.</p>
<p>In choosing to continue operations, these companies have then rushed to enforce measures to put customers at ease. Such measures have included no-contact deliveries, card-only payments, and displaying temperature readings of workers.</p>
<p>Uber and Ola Cabs suspended services in most areas, and announced that in places where they are <a href="https://www.livemint.com/news/india/covid-19-uber-to-offer-cabs-for-essential-services-11586077100965.html" target="_blank">providing essential services</a>, workers have been instructed to wear masks and observe hygiene standards.</p>
<p>Swiggy and Zomato announced they were communicating with workers about safety and hygiene standards. Zomato has more recently <a href="https://twitter.com/deepigoyal/status/1252844887797428230" target="_blank">announced</a> that the company is making the Aarogya Setu app mandatory for workers to receive orders.</p>
<p><a href="https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/small-biz/startups/newsbuzz/covid-19-zomato-sets-up-funds-for-income-starved-daily-wage-workers-in-india/articleshow/74823838.cms" target="_blank">Relief funds</a> have been set up— donations to these funds continue to be solicited from the public and company executives have made grandiose gestures of <a href="https://www.carandbike.com/news/ola-introduces-drive-the-driver-fund-initiative-to-fund-relief-for-driver-community-2201886" target="_blank">contributing their salaries</a> to these funds.</p>
<p><strong>Stark reality</strong></p>
<p>The situation on the ground, however, tells another story. Actions to protect workers, who are taking on significant risks, have been far less forthcoming than those for customers. Workers are also bearing the brunt of arbitrary surveillance measures, like being asked to download the Aarogya Setu app, in addition to scrutiny they are placed under regularly. No such surveillance measures have been placed on customers. The priorities of on-demand service companies are clear: protect the bottom line at the expense of vulnerable workers.</p>
<p>In the absence of any concerted support from the companies, service workers could have looked to the state for relief. None has been forthcoming. Government action has pegged the targeting of relief works and services to those currently eligible for welfare programs and registered under its various schemes. Most gig workers, if not all, are ineligible as a result of the arbitrary conditions underlying these schemes.</p>
<p>We spoke to the leaders of four unions — including the Indian Federation of App-based Transport Workers (IFAT) and the Ola and Uber Drivers and Owners’ Association (OTU)– who represent gig workers across the country about the risks and vulnerabilities that they are having to contend with.</p>
<p>The precariousness characterising gig work could not be starker. A summary of the discussions can be found <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/zothan-mawii-covid-19-and-relief-measures-for-gig-workers-in-india" target="_blank">here</a>, while the recommendations emerging from these discussions have been shared with government officials and company representatives and can be found in full <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/covid-19-charter-of-recommendations" target="_blank">here</a>.</p>
<p>Below are some of the key recommendations that emerged from these discussions.</p>
<p><strong>Health</strong></p>
<p>Many on-demand service companies have not provided workers with any personal protective equipment (PPE), not even to delivery workers who face heightened risks of exposure to the coronavirus at nearly every step of the delivery process.</p>
<p>Some unions had to take to distributing masks, while many other workers continue to incur repeated costs to safeguard their own health. At a later stage, Swiggy announced that workers would be reimbursed for these purchases, but the process is so tedious that workers have found it untenable.</p>
<p>In addition, health awareness campaigns regarding safety measures and risks were also launched very late into the crisis, and then were not in vernacular languages and could not be comprehended by most workers.</p>
<p>In terms of insurance, most platforms have announced financial assistance for workers who test positive for COVID-19. This is aimed at covering their hospital expenses, as well as providing a daily stipend for a limited period. However, these come short as there are no provisions for OPD consultations or even for the cost of going and getting tested (losing one day’s work and then potentially one more before the results come in).</p>
<p>Additionally, the difficulty and expenses of obtaining a test could place an additional burden on workers — as without proof of a positive test, workers will be unable to access this fund in the first place. This is far from the robust health insurance that must be provisioned to ensure workers’ health and safety. Some platforms have made telemedicine services available for workers and while this is a step in the right direction, it must be backed by more tangible protections like covering part of the costs incurred for treatment.</p>
<p>Unions demand that companies provide adequate PPE to workers free of cost —masks, gloves, hand sanitisers, and soap. If platforms continue to ask workers to log in at significant risks to themselves and their families, provision of safety equipment is the basic minimum requirement that must be met immediately. This should also include a plan to ensure workers’ access to clean and hygienic sanitation facilities, as they may not have access to these on their delivery routes.</p>
<p>In addition, platforms must provide health insurance cover in addition to accident insurance coverage and hospitalisation cover for COVID-19. This should include OPD consultations.</p>
<p><strong>Income security and social protection</strong></p>
<p>With services suspended or demand really low, gig workers have either lost their income or seen it fall drastically — delivery workers’ daily earnings are as low as Rs 150-Rs 300 for a full day’s work.</p>
<p>Almost a month into the lockdown, there is little clarity as to who is eligible for the funds that companies have raised, and in what manner and or what purposes it will be disbursed.</p>
<p>Ola Cabs has offered interest free loans to drivers for relief in the short term, while some Uber drivers have received a Rs 3,000 grant from the company. If disbursed universally this would ensure availability of some liquidity for workers, although at this stage it remains unclear if all drivers are eligible to receive the grant.</p>
<p>Workers and unions are afraid that this grant might only be accessible for workers with high ratings, or those who have logged longer hours especially through the course of the lockdown period. This would effectively penalise workers for going to their homes for the lockdown, or being otherwise unable to work. Unions have estimated that not more than 20 percent of workers continue to remain active through the lockdown period.</p>
<p>Moreover, research has shown that workers are not necessarily aware of the protections made available to them as a result of the legalese that companies couch these terms in.</p>
<p>To ensure income security, platforms must make direct cash transfers to all workers who have logged in for at least two weeks between January and April 2020. This should be fixed according to minimum wage standards for skilled work in each state or at Rs 1,000 per day of the lockdown, and will have to be enforced with retrospective effect.</p>
<p>The former should be treated as an entitlement of workers while a portion of the latter can be asked to be repaid by the workers over the course of the next year. The fiscal responsibility for the cash transfers can be shared with governments. Governments can request the data held by these companies for the transfers.</p>
<p><strong>Rent and loans</strong></p>
<p>Some states have announced moratoriums on house rent but again there is no explicit mention of gig workers being included in this — and in states where such a move hasn’t been announced, gig workers must continue to pay house rent without having a source of income to rely on.</p>
<p>On the issue of loan repayments, the RBI allowed lending institutions to grant a three-month moratorium on retail loan repayments as a part of its COVID-19 regulatory package. On the one hand, availing of the moratorium will significantly increase the loan tenure and total amount to be repaid. On the other, several gig workers have reported that the enforcement of the moratorium itself has been piecemeal outside of public sector institutions.</p>
<p>Here again they have to make a Faustian bargain. The government should enforce the RBI’s directive strictly so gig workers get some relief.</p>
<p>Further, several companies themselves have leased vehicles to workers, for which payment of EMI must be ceased through the months of March to May to allow workers some relief without requiring the return of vehicles. Currently, EMIs have only been stalled on the condition of returning vehicles.</p>
<p><strong>Harassment</strong></p>
<p>Workers have been subject to harassment and discrimination by the police and customers alike, making it difficult to continue work. Despite the categorisation of delivery as an essential service, companies are finding it difficult to get easy access to movement passes in bulk, which implies that workers are penalised by being unable to work even if they are available. Companies have come out to allege harassment despite clear directions to allow movement of delivery workers, which points to gaps in enforcement.</p>
<p>Further, frequent barricading has implied that workers are not able to complete orders without diversions despite having passes for movement. Meanwhile, companies continue to mandate door-to-door delivery so as to ensure that customers are not inconvenienced at all. In some cases, this has implied that workers have to travel on foot in barricaded areas to deliver orders.</p>
<p>We recommend that companies urgently set up a helpline for workers to address such issues that may arise in delivery. We also recommend that companies proactively work with the government to map hotspots and containment zones and cease delivery in such areas. Thus far, there is no indication of any such measures by companies.</p>
<p><strong>Post-lockdown revival</strong></p>
<p>The lockdown brings to the fore just how vulnerable gig workers are.</p>
<p>This is a direct consequence of the gig work arrangements structured as disguised employment. Deeming workers as independent contractors and self-identifying as technology providers, on-demand service companies have washed their hands of the responsibility of providing labour protections and social security measures despite exerting extensive control over the conditions of work (such as wages, incentives) and the manner of its dispensing (such as the standard of work, hours of work).</p>
<p>Governments, too, have done little to recognise gig workers although they have been added as a category of workers in the draft Social Security code. Relief measures announced by the government exclude them. However, the government needs to intervene urgently in the current situation.</p>
<p>Platforms are likely to recover once the lockdown is lifted —home delivery services like BigBasket and Grofers have already seen their businesses skyrocket.</p>
<p>However, there is an urgent need to rebuild on-demand work as one that isn’t merely in the service of capital. A first step to that would be to reduce commissions to 5% for at least 6 months so that workers can recover financially. The unencumbered spending to capture market share at the expense of workers needs to be curbed. Enforcing these recommendations will require a coordinated effort between governments and on-demand service companies. As consumers, it is also our responsibility to question companies that do not take on the moral responsibilities of extending adequate worker protections.</p>
<p>With unemployment in the country skyrocketing, it may be the case that on-demand work opens up avenues to securing work. It then becomes imperative to ensure any future of work is one that is inclusive and accounts for the systemic changes that are now impossible to ignore.</p>
<p>While social distancing is a choice truly available to a privileged few, we need to ensure that social protection isn’t.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/gig-workers-need-support'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/gig-workers-need-support</a>
</p>
No publisherZothan Mawii (Tandem Research), Aayush Rathi (CIS), and Ambika Tandon (CIS)Gig WorkDigital LabourResearchPlatform-WorkNetwork EconomiesPublicationsResearchers at Work2020-05-19T06:57:36ZBlog EntryNoopur Raval and Rajendra Jadhav - Power Chronography of Food-Delivery Work
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/noopur-raval-rajendra-jadhav-power-chronography-of-food-delivery-work
<b> Working in the gig-economy has been associated with economic vulnerabilities. However, there are also moral and affective vulnerabilities as workers find their worth measured everyday by their performance of—and at—work and in every interaction and movement. This essay by Noopur Raval and Rajendra Jadhav is the fourth among a series of writings by researchers associated with the 'Mapping Digital Labour in India' project at the CIS, supported by the Azim Premji University, that were published on the Platypus blog of the Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing (CASTAC).</b>
<p> </p>
<p><em>Originally published by the <a href="http://blog.castac.org/category/series/indias-gig-work-economy/" target="_blank">Platypus blog</a> of CASTAC on August 15, 2019.</em></p>
<p><em>The ethnographic research was conducted by Rajendra and this short essay was collaboratively produced by the field researcher and Noopur (co-PI). The accompanying audio recording has been produced by Noopur.</em></p>
<h4>Summary of the essay in Hindi: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPIfIvp2000" target="_blank">Audio</a> (YouTube) and <a href="http://blog.castac.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/08/Rajendra-Hindi-Transcript-.docx" target="_blank">Transcript</a> (text)</h4>
<hr />
<p>This post presents the observations around the design of temporality within app-based food-delivery platforms in India. It draws on semi-structured interviews by field-researcher Rajendra and his time spent “hanging out” with food-delivery workers who are also often referred to as “hunger saviors” and “partners” in the platform ecosystem in India. Like in the <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/simiran-lalvani-workers-fictive-kinship-relations-app-based-food-delivery-mumbai" target="_blank">earlier post by Simiran Lalvani</a> on food-delivery workers in Mumbai, we also observed that app-based work was structured and monitored along similar lines. However, in this post, we go into a detailed description of how work-time and temporality of work are configured in order to fulfill the promises that app companies make to customers in urban India. Before such app-based services came into existence, there were some popular claims around delivery-time (“30 minutes or free pizza” by Domino’s) but the entire process of food preparation, travel and delivery had not been made as transparent and quantified in a granular way as they are now through popular apps such as Swiggy, Zomato and UberEats. While such companies exist in the other parts of the world and make the promise of “anytime work” to potential workers, as we observed during fieldwork, app-based food delivery-work is anything but flexible. People could indeed start working at any time of the day, but it had real consequences to earn a living wage. While they were free to logout or switch off their app also at their convenience, they would be constantly nudged in the form of calls by warehouse managers as well as through text messages telling them how they were missing out on earnings. It is also important to note that, in India especially, food-delivery as a standardized form of work, exists in a regulatory grey space. In that sense, there is not a lot of clarity on the maximum limit of working hours in a day and in a week. In the following sections, I provide details about how work is structured temporally in this system.</p>
<h3><strong>Shift-based Work</strong></h3>
<p>When Rajendra spoke to workers in the Delhi-NCR region, they reported that they could choose to work different kinds of shifts like part-time (8 AM – 3 PM or 7 PM – 12 AM), full-time (11 AM -11 PM) or ultra full-time (7 AM -11 PM). While workers could pick their timings or slots on weekdays, it was mandatory to work on the weekends. As mentioned earlier, while companies claimed that riders could log in and out at any time of the day, their pay depended on the number of deliveries they make and the hours they worked. But it’s not that simple. It is not just the wholly quantified units (an hour, a day) that become exigent and overbearing; it was in fact how these rules demanded high levels of alertness and care from the workers. Any kind of carelessness, not paying attention (to time, text message announcements) could be detrimental to claiming pay for the work they had done already. For instance, like a worker described, if he even logged out a minute before the end of the shift, he would lose out on his incentive. Another worker added,</p>
<blockquote>If you log off even five minutes before eleven (pm), a call comes from the company and they ask you to log back in immediately.</blockquote>
<p>In such cases, those managing the backend systems even make these calls to shield workers from the eventuality of losing pay and the hassle of resolving disputed payments later by simply urging and pushing workers to stay on-time and online. In that sense, there is not only an expectation of punctuality and always being-on as a desirable thing, but it is also imperative for the workers to meet these expectations while they interact with the app itself.</p>
<p> </p>
<img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/CIS_APU_DigitalLabour_PlatypusEssays_NRRJ_01.jpg/image_preview" alt="CIS_APU_DigitalLabour_PlatypusEssays_NR-RJ_01" class="image-left image-inline" title="CIS_APU_DigitalLabour_PlatypusEssays_NR-RJ_01" />
<h5>Sticker provided by a food-delivery platform to promote its brand. <em>Source: Noopur Raval, author</em>.</h5>
<p> </p>
<h3><strong>Time of Eating, Time of Sleeping</strong></h3>
<p>Typically, restaurants and food businesses in Indian cities are heavily regulated, especially in terms of closing times. While these rules differ for each city, in and around Delhi, restaurants are expected to close down by 10 pm, and those that seek to remain open for longer need special permissions. With the arrival of app-based delivery companies, the time of food production and consumption has stretched. Also, with the right kinds of permits, cloud kitchens and home-based producers are also allowed to operate through these platforms, thus making multiple food choices and cuisines available until as late as 4 am in the morning. Whose consumption needs are being serviced at these late hours is a question beyond the scope of this post, but it also means that there is opportunity/compulsion for workers to stay up late at night, making deliveries. Not surprisingly, it is also often these late-night shifts that are better incentivized, not just money-wise but also because there is less traffic at night (a constant source of stress in day-time shifts). As other studies have also noted, platform companies, especially food-delivery services that mostly engage bike and scooter riders (Lee et al. 2016) globally, enforce this cruel temporal inversion where being a service-worker in this economy also means working on others’ (customers’) time of leisure and/or comfort. Especially in Delhi, where the winters get brutally cold, ironically, the profitability of delivering hot food increases. However, it is not that straightforward. One worker Rajendra spoke to in March (springtime) explained,</p>
<blockquote>I am not going to work with any of the food delivery company from April onwards because of the hot summer in Delhi, it is very difficult to ride in a day time of summer.</blockquote>
<h3><strong>Temporary Work</strong></h3>
<p>Temporariness is the dominant temporal fate of gig-work at-large—workers in our study (food-delivery as well as ride-hailing) often insisted how gig-work was only temporary until they could become business-owners, find a better job, or fund their education and so on. However, as we observed in food-delivery work, there was also a lot of seasonal movement of workers, a reminder of the contextual, ecological and urban migration continuities that inform, support and shape who comes to the reserve force/waiting zone of gig-work. In classic labour terms, the push and pull factors that move people out of agricultural labour or other kinds of work must be studied with an eye to new forms of easy-entry jobs such as gig-work. On the other hand, there were also other considerations on time such as responsibilities and social obligations to family that made food-delivery work (fast paced, inhering a certain amount of recklessness and the willingness to put oneself at risk) less attractive to some (older men and women with a family) and more to some others (younger single men). This made us think of the way in which Sarah Sharma (2011) emphasizes temporal power over speed discourses (she offers the term ‘power-chronography’) where, the ways in which food-delivery work is temporally arranged, distributed and rewarded, privileges certain actors (the customers but also some kinds of workers) over others in the city’s labour market.</p>
<h3><strong>References</strong></h3>
<p>Lee, Do J., et al. “Delivering (in) justice: Food delivery cyclists in New York City.” <em>Bicycle Justice and Urban Transformation</em>. Routledge, 2016. 114-129.</p>
<p>Sharma, Sarah. “It changes space and time: introducing power-chronography.” <em>Communication Matters: Materialist Approaches to Media, Mobility and Networks</em> (2011): 66-77.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/noopur-raval-rajendra-jadhav-power-chronography-of-food-delivery-work'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/noopur-raval-rajendra-jadhav-power-chronography-of-food-delivery-work</a>
</p>
No publisherNoopur Raval and Rajendra JadhavDigital LabourResearchPlatform-WorkNetwork EconomiesPublicationsResearchers at WorkMapping Digital Labour in India2020-05-19T06:33:39ZBlog EntryAnushree Gupta - Ladies ‘Log’: Women’s Safety and Risk Transfer in Ridehailing
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/anushree-gupta-ladies-log-women-safety-risk-transfer-ridehailing
<b>Working in the gig-economy has been associated with economic vulnerabilities. However, there are also moral and affective vulnerabilities as workers find their worth measured everyday by their performance of—and at—work and in every interaction and movement. This essay by Anushree Gupta is the third among a series of writings by researchers associated with the 'Mapping Digital Labour in India' project at the CIS, supported by the Azim Premji University, that were published on the Platypus blog of the Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing (CASTAC). The essay is edited by Noopur Raval, who co-led the project concerned.</b>
<p> </p>
<p><em>Originally published by the <a href="http://blog.castac.org/category/series/indias-gig-work-economy/" target="_blank">Platypus blog</a> of CASTAC on August, 1, 2019.</em></p>
<h4>Summary of the essay in Hindi: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ty0a_u9lzCE" target="_blank">Audio</a> (YouTube) and <a href="http://blog.castac.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/07/Blog-Post-Audio-Transcript-Devanigiri.docx" target="_blank">Transcript</a> (text)</h4>
<hr />
<p>Mumbai, India’s financial capital, is also often considered one of the safest cities for women in India, especially in contrast with New Delhi which is infamously dubbed as the “rape capital” within the country. Sensationalised incidents of harassment, molestation and rape serve as anecdotal references and warnings to other women who dare to venture out alone even during the daytime. The Delhi government recently proposed a policy for free transport for women in public buses and metro trains with the objective of increasing women’s affordability and access and to ensure safety in public transportation. [1] Despite such measures to increase women’s visibility and claims to public utilities and spaces, women who use public transport have historically suffered groping and stalking on buses and trains, which uphold self-policing and surveillance narratives. The issue of women’s safety in India remains a priority as well as a good rhetorical claim and goal to aspire to, for public and private initiatives. Ironically, the notion of women’s safety is also advanced to increase moral policing and censure women’s access to public spaces, which also perpetuates exclusion of other marginalised citizens (Phadke 2007). Further, and crucially, whose safety is being imagined, prioritized and designed for (which class of women are central to the imagination of the safety discourse) is often a point of contention.</p>
<p>In this context, ridehailing services offered by Uber and Ola have come to be frequently cited as safer and more reliable options for women to traverse the cityspace, compared to overcrowded buses and trains. Their mobile applications promise accountability and traceability, enforcing safety standards by way of qualified and well-groomed drivers, SOS buttons and location-sharing features. However, it has increasingly become common knowledge that these alternatives are prone to similar, if not worse, categories of crimes against women. While reports of violence against women in cabs have mostly been outside of Mumbai, due to “platform-effects,” such incidents have widespread ramifications for drivers across the country. Cab drivers who operate via cab aggregator platforms have come under heavy scrutiny not only by the corporate and legal infrastructures of aggregator companies but also in the public eye. On the other hand, platform companies independently, and in partnership with city and state administrations, continue to launch “social impact” initiatives aimed at women’s safety as well as employment (through taxi-driving training). [2] Incidents of violence against women present jarring narratives of risk not only for female passengers but also for the platform-workers, both of whom are responsible for abiding by the constructed notions of safety for women in urban spaces.</p>
<p>In this post, I explore women’s presence as workers as well as passengers/customers in the ridehailing platform economy, in the context of women’s safety, situating the analysis with a focus on Mumbai. The related discourses around risk for female commuters give rise to various interventions and women-centric services through female-only cab enterprises and training more women drivers to mitigate this risk. Through these, I will think through the figure of the woman in the ridehailing economy in Mumbai and by extension in India.</p>
<h3><strong>Platforms in Gendered Cityscapes</strong></h3>
<p>Mumbai’s public transport is comprised of the local train network, BEST buses and auto rickshaws, with the metro being the newest addition to the mix. Unlike in most of India, kaali-peelis (black-yellow cabs) have been a permanent feature of Mumbai’s landscape since the 1950s and, taking a cab is not necessarily a luxury. Against this backdrop, platform companies have sought to make the claims of democratizing public transport and providing safer travel options to women in the city.</p>
<p>Cab drivers on ridehailing platforms in Mumbai are usually domestic male migrants or Muslim drivers from within and outside the city, who are more often than not overworked and stressed due to the falling incomes and rising debts. It is important to recognise the ‘veiled masculinities’ (Chopra 2006) which labor to service the emergent platform economy and the hierarchies of caste and class which are sustained through their labor. The incongruence between the masculinity of a working class man and the demands of the service economy (Nixon 2009) exacerbates emotional pressures in customer-facing services, which can offer an explanation for angry outbursts and conflicts between drivers and customers.</p>
<p> </p>
<img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/CIS_APU_DigitalLabour_PlatypusEssays_AG_01.jpg/image_preview" alt="CIS_APU_DigitalLabour_PlatypusEssays_AG_01" class="image-left image-inline" title="CIS_APU_DigitalLabour_PlatypusEssays_AG_01" />
<h5>Uber’s ad on a billboard in Mumbai promises earnings of more than Rs. 1 lakh per month. Using a woman’s image illustrates the extent of their potential for transforming lives and livelihoods. <em>Source: Drivers’ Union Telegram Group</em>.</h5>
<p> </p>
<p>While Uber and Ola claim that a large number of women drivers work on their platforms, actual experiences of passengers and the male drivers I spoke to, suggested otherwise. Ironically, mass driver-training programs are seen as a quick way to make low-skilled and migrant male workers employable in Indian cities while, despite public-private partnerships to train women, it has been impossible to retain women drivers due to stereotypical perceptions of gender and persistent social stigma. [3] This made the ridehailing passenger woman (upper middle class, affording professional) a stakeholder to design for, while female drivers (but all female workers) appeared as liability for platforms.</p>
<p>These narratives speak directly to the construction of insecurity and risk for women (Berrington and Jones 2002) on public transport systems as they highlight vulnerabilities due to public exposure of women’s bodies. Pandering to a moral panic standpoint and creating personalised or ‘inside’ safe spaces for women to manage risk (Green and Singleton 2006), these platforms can then be imagined as a boundary-setting exercise. Access to public spaces is encouraged but it is delimited by confining the woman’s body to a singular vehicle in the custody of the cab driver. Autonomy and access afforded by the platform manages to transform women—particularly upper class and upper caste women who can afford these services—into potential customers. Their agency is bounded though by tasking the driver to ferry her across the otherwise hostile cityscape filled with ‘unfriendly bodies’ (Phadke 2013). The production of the city’s gendered space goes hand in hand with the confinement/erasure of female bodies in the public space as they embody patriarchal norms even in a city as ‘progressive’ as Mumbai. As demonstrated by studies mapping the movement of women in the city (Ranade 2007), the spatio-temporal factors lend themselves to creating gendered bodies in order to keep patriarchal norms intact. These norms, as I argue in this post, are detrimental not just to women but also other marginalised sections of the urban population, in this case platform workers.</p>
<h3><strong>Terms of Safety</strong></h3>
<p>Male drivers’ social identities as lower class, lower caste individuals do not inspire confidence in the standards of safety boasted by these companies in the eyes of their predominantly upper caste and upper class customer base. Risk to female passengers is further exaggerated due to the closed space in which the service is provided, highlighting the proximity to a potential aggressor by way of these platforms. In specific situations wherein a female passenger is inebriated or is travelling alone at night, drivers report being extra cautious and helpful towards her. Many respondents proudly mention going out of their way to make sure women get home safely, for instance, prolonging waiting time or escorting them to the entrance of their residential buildings or involving the security guard at the gate.</p>
<p>However, there have also been cases wherein the driver has been under scrutiny either by an overly careful passenger or by the public. One driver reported being surrounded by a crowd at a traffic signal, only to realise that he was being suspected of foul play with the female passenger who had fallen asleep on the backseat of the car. In contrast to their western counterparts, the class differences between drivers and passengers in India exacerbate doubts, fears and insecurities in India which tend to take a caste-purity angle as well. The woman’s body undergoes an exchange of custody in these instances wherein she is deemed incapable of taking care of herself and requires external assistance. Imagining a deterrence effect of ridesharing services (Park et. al 2017) reinforces the logic of guardianship and protectionism for the woman. The risk of carrying her in the vehicle in these situations is borne by the cab driver, operating under a framework of overbearing protectiveness which holds him culpable for any misgivings, assumed or otherwise.</p>
<p> </p>
<img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/CIS_APU_DigitalLabour_PlatypusEssays_AG_02.jpg/image_preview" alt="CIS_APU_DigitalLabour_PlatypusEssays_AG_02" class="image-left image-inline" title="CIS_APU_DigitalLabour_PlatypusEssays_AG_02" />
<h5>Cautionary listicles advise women to not take a cab alone at night, carrying pepper sprays/umbrellas as tools for self-defence, refrain from conversations with drivers or talk continuously on the phone, among other things. The onus of the woman’s safety is either on the individual herself or the driver who is ferrying her. Moreover, the driver is a likely assailant whom the woman should guard against as well. <em>Source: <a href="https://www.hellotravel.com/stories/10-ways-for-women-to-ensure-safety-when-boarding-cab" target="_blank">HelloTravel</a></em>.</h5>
<p> </p>
<p>Notions of safety and risk are embodied in everyday interactions in urban spaces and mediated by disparate infrastructures of knowledge across distinctions of caste, class and gender. These distinctions define constraints which govern social interactions between actors of these categories. Interactions between lower caste or Muslim men and upper caste/class women are circumscribed by what Tuan (1979) describes as ‘landscapes of fear’. Be it the apprehensions about sharing a ride with a passenger of the opposite sex (Sarriera et. al 2017) or reports of gang-rapes by cab drivers, the boundaries of social conduct are laid out clearly by constructing narratives of risk and safety. The protection of the female body and her sexual safety is not her responsibility alone but that of the society as a whole. The so called preventive measures for rape and violence against women produce the dichotomies of frailty and strength (Campbell 2005) in so far as they project the woman as always at risk with the shadow of a potential assault always looming large.</p>
<p>When asked about interactions with women as customers or fellow drivers, drivers performed exaggerated respectability for women. The catch in these narratives however was that drivers justified and extended respect only to ‘good’ customers, where a ‘good’ woman was a certain kind of a moral actor.</p>
<p>Given the prevailing discontent with redressal mechanisms for workers on the platforms, it was not surprising to witness a group of drivers at the Uber Seva Kendra (help centre) in Mumbai, debating whether they should be accepting requests from any female customers at all. Drivers also had to attend mandatory training sessions for ‘good conduct’ with customers wherein they underwent behavioral correction and gender sensitisation lessons. [4] The gendering of the platform economy is baked into these instructions and trainings that reproduce male drivers as figures of safety and constant positive affect.</p>
<h3><strong>Gender, Safety, and Enterprise</strong></h3>
<p>In my fieldwork, I also came across a slew of ventures run by fleet owners and others that sought to service women passengers and employ women drivers exclusively. Claiming to fill in the gaps of inadequate vetting mechanisms in existing platforms, these alternate ventures purportedly smoothened out some anxieties by eliminating the risk of interacting with a man from different socio-economic strata. The premium charged by these companies was telling of the value of safety and affordability of these services for a large section of their intended audience, namely women with higher disposable incomes residing in metropolitan cities.</p>
<p>On the flipside, these enterprises encouraged women to break stereotypical perceptions about women drivers, also giving a nod to increasing and diversifying opportunities of employment for women. However, these ideas remained attractive only in principle and fizzled out sooner or later as most of these ventures did not succeed. A severe capital crunch due to unsustainable business models, limited funding options and lack of substantial supportive ecosystems for training and upkeep are possible reasons for failure. [5] Even so, the idea of a women-centric service continues to remain valuable because of the promise of safety which is produced through considerations of class, caste, gender and religion (Phadke 2005). Any alternative to avoid interaction with men from a lower class or caste background or from another religion (especially Hindu/Muslim in Mumbai) is welcome in a society which is deeply stratified and entrenched in caste-class systems of religion and economy alike.</p>
<h3><strong>Conclusion</strong></h3>
<p>The pervasiveness of the discourses of safety and risk in the ride hailing space became apparent to me during field research. Respondents indicated a heightened awareness of my gender, referring to me as “madam” and taking measures to ensure my safety. They advised me to use a separate phone to interact with drivers and moderated my interactions with drivers on the Telegram group (run by one of the Unions in Mumbai). Union representatives were also diligent in moderating the group to filter out abusive language as a token of respect for women. My apprehensions in interacting with drivers, most of whom were older men from a lower class/caste community, were also indicative of my social conditioning as an upper class and upper caste woman. Self-policing and boundary setting in both physical and virtual interactions, while necessary to some extent, were often rendered useless as the shifting of risks became apparent to me in my interactions with the drivers.</p>
<p>In this piece, I have tried to show how gendered norms govern the construction of safety and risk which in turn regulate social interactions. Limiting exposure in a personal cab as opposed to a public bus/train also heightens considerations of intimacy and proximity to a potential aggressor (often from a marginalised sociocultural background). Women-centric cab services mitigate this by promoting the image of the female driver who breaks social norms. However, these services dwindle till they completely disappear due to a capital crunch or insufficient infrastructural support. Patriarchal contexts reaffirm the woman as a risky object by highlighting narratives of vulnerabilities and insecurities in the ridehailing space. Besides the woman, the cab drivers are held accountable for bearing this risk and ensuring her sexual and physical safety. These patriarchal hierarchies of protectionism are sustained by platform workers’ affective labour which lubricate the wheels of the platform economy.</p>
<h3><strong>Endnotes</strong></h3>
<p>[1] <a href="https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/free-rides-for-women-only-the-starting-point-say-activists/article28111938.ece" target="_blank">https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/free-rides-for-women-only-the-starting-point-say-activists/article28111938.ece</a></p>
<p>[2] <a href="https://www.olacabs.com/media/in/press/ola-foundation-launches-drive-to-enable-sustainable-livelihoods-for-500000-women-by-2025" target="_blank">https://www.olacabs.com/media/in/press/ola-foundation-launches-drive-to-enable-sustainable-livelihoods-for-500000-women-by-2025</a></p>
<p>[3] <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/soniathomas/girl-power" target="_blank">https://www.buzzfeed.com/soniathomas/girl-power</a></p>
<p>[4] <a href="https://yourstory.com/2018/11/uber-gender-awareness-sensitisation-driver" target="_blank">https://yourstory.com/2018/11/uber-gender-awareness-sensitisation-driver</a></p>
<p>[5] <a href="https://www.livemint.com/Companies/bo4534H8mOWo0oG6VQ0xbM/As-demand-for-womenonly-cab-services-grow-challenges-loom.html" target="_blank">https://www.livemint.com/Companies/bo4534H8mOWo0oG6VQ0xbM/As-demand-for-womenonly-cab-services-grow-challenges-loom.html</a></p>
<h3><strong>References</strong></h3>
<p>Berrington, E. and Jones, H., 2002. Reality vs. myth: Constructions of women’s insecurity. Feminist Media Studies, 2(3), pp.307-323.</p>
<p>Campbell, A., 2005. Keeping the ‘lady’ safe: The regulation of femininity through crime prevention literature. Critical Criminology, 13(2), pp.119-140.</p>
<p>Chopra, R., 2006. Invisible men: Masculinity, sexuality, and male domestic Labor. Men and Masculinities, 9(2), pp.152-167.</p>
<p>Green, E. and Singleton, C., 2006. Risky bodies at leisure: Young women negotiating space and place. Sociology, 40(5), pp.853-871.</p>
<p>Nixon, D., 2009. I Can’t Put a Smiley Face On’: Working‐Class Masculinity, Emotional Labour and Service Work in the ‘New Economy. Gender, Work & Organization, 16(3), pp.300-322.</p>
<p>Park, J., Kim, J., Pang, M.S. and Lee, B., 2017. Offender or guardian? An empirical analysis of ride-sharing and sexual assault. An Empirical Analysis of Ride-Sharing and Sexual Assault (April 10, 2017). KAIST College of Business Working Paper Series, (2017-006), pp.18-010.</p>
<p>Phadke, S., 2005. ‘You Can Be Lonely in a Crowd’ The Production of Safety in Mumbai. Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 12(1), pp.41-62.</p>
<p>Phadke, S., 2007. Dangerous liaisons: Women and men: Risk and reputation in Mumbai. Economic and Political Weekly, pp.1510-1518.</p>
<p>Phadke, S., 2013. Unfriendly bodies, hostile cities: Reflections on loitering and gendered public space. Economic and Political Weekly, pp.50-59.</p>
<p>Ranade, S., 2007. The way she moves: Mapping the everyday production of gender-space. Economic and Political Weekly, pp.1519-1526.</p>
<p>Raval, N. and Dourish, P., 2016, February. Standing out from the crowd: Emotional labor, body labor, and temporal labor in ridesharing. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (pp. 97-107). ACM.</p>
<p>Sarriera, J.M., Álvarez, G.E., Blynn, K., Alesbury, A., Scully, T. and Zhao, J., 2017. To share or not to share: Investigating the social aspects of dynamic ridesharing. Transportation Research Record, 2605(1), pp.109-117.</p>
<p>Tuan, Y.F., 2013. Landscapes of fear. U of Minnesota Press.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/anushree-gupta-ladies-log-women-safety-risk-transfer-ridehailing'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/anushree-gupta-ladies-log-women-safety-risk-transfer-ridehailing</a>
</p>
No publisherAnushree GuptaDigital LabourResearchPlatform-WorkNetwork EconomiesPublicationsResearchers at WorkMapping Digital Labour in India2020-05-19T06:29:12ZBlog EntrySarah Zia - Not knowing as pedagogy: Ride-hailing drivers in Delhi
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/sarah-zia-not-knowing-as-pedagogy-ride-hailing-drivers-in-delhi
<b>Working in the gig-economy has been associated with economic vulnerabilities. However, there are also moral and affective vulnerabilities as workers find their worth measured everyday by their performance of—and at—work and in every interaction and movement. This essay by Sarah Zia is the second among a series of writings by researchers associated with the 'Mapping Digital Labour in India' project at the CIS, supported by the Azim Premji University, that were published on the Platypus blog of the Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing (CASTAC). The essay is edited by Noopur Raval, who co-led the project.</b>
<p> </p>
<p><em>Originally published by the <a href="http://blog.castac.org/category/series/indias-gig-work-economy/" target="_blank">Platypus blog</a> of CASTAC on July 18, 2019.</em></p>
<h4>Summary of the essay in Hindi: <a href="https://youtu.be/KSYcT8XD0H4" target="_blank">Audio</a> (YouTube) and <a href="http://blog.castac.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/07/CASTAC_Sarah_audiotranscript.docx" target="_blank">Transcript</a> (text)</h4>
<hr />
<p>Ride-hailing [1] platforms such as Olacabs and Uber have “disrupted” public transport in India since their arrival. It has been almost seven years since app-based ride-hailing became a permanent feature of urban and peri-urban India with these aggregators operating in over a 100 Indian cities now. Akin to the global story, much has happened – there was a period of boom and novelty for passengers and drivers, then incentives fell. Ride-hailing work has become increasingly demanding with reduced payouts. But what hasn’t received enough attention (especially outside the US) is how these platforms create a deliberate regime of information invisibility and control to keep the drivers constantly on their toes which works to the companies’ advantage. What then are the implications of this uncertainty, which is fueled by app design as well as by the companies’ decision that drivers need little or no information about users? How does service delivery operate in a context where those actually delivering it have little or no idea about the workings of the system?</p>
<h3><strong>When algorithms make us not know</strong></h3>
<p>Algorithmic interactions form the core of the technology in ride-hailing apps through which service seekers and providers interact. As Lee et al. (2015) describe, “Algorithmic management allows companies to oversee myriads of workers in an optimized manner at a large scale, but its impact on human workers and work practices has been largely unexplored… Algorithmic management is one of the core innovations that enables these (cab-riding) services.”</p>
<p>Algorithms are procedural logics that produce different effects depending on the data they receive and the outputs they are optimized for (Wilson, 2016). Moreover, platform companies are not transparent about how their business logics contribute to these “optimizations”, which makes it difficult for all the stakeholders (passengers, drivers, police personnel, etc.) to make an accurate assessment of their functioning. This essay, then, explores how the lack of transparency around algorithmic structures not only prohibits drivers from knowing completely and surely about their work (“why did I get this ride?”, “why did my ratings drop?”) but also how they build tactics of coping and earning from a place of unknowing. Algorithms act as a regulator of work and their inherent structure constrains drivers from knowing fully about their work. Unknowing thus has two aspects: first, drivers do not have access or means to gather information; second, it is difficult to be sure of the existence of the said information in the first place.</p>
<p>In my research on ridehailing in the Delhi-National Capital Region (NCR), there were three things that I asked drivers about which led to ambiguous and inconsistent replies: how rides were allocated, how fares were determined and how ratings worked. While some drivers told me upfront they did not know how these systems worked, others offered explanations that they had devised or heard from somewhere else. For instance, not knowing what they will make per trip means that drivers plan their day in terms of target earnings instead of number of trips. Nearly all drivers I spoke to said they aimed to make Rs 1500-2000 (approx USD 20-25) per day in order to break even, irrespective of whether that goal requires 10 or 15 trips in a day. Yet not knowing what the next trip will earn them means they can’t refuse rides easily. Many drivers expressed discomfort about this fact, especially when compared to other means such as auto-rickshaws and traditional cabs where drop destination is known beforehand and fares can also be pre-negotiated, Unlike ride-hailing drivers, auto rickshaw drivers have the right to refuse passengers.</p>
<p>Many drivers now call passengers after accepting their booking to find out the destination. According to some drivers, this call also helped them understand the kind of passengers they were about to get and sometimes even allowed re-negotiation of the drop location to a mutually convenient spot if it was originally in a congested area. They also felt that assessing passengers before a trip was important so that they could act as mediators in the information gatekeeping process, because the passengers would have seen the fare already. For a driver, the lack of information added many layers of constant negotiation in a single trip—starting from the call to find out the destination to conversations during the trip to gauge potential earnings to finally suggesting alternative drop locations if there are any constraints in accessing the original destination—before they can claim their rightful earnings.</p>
<p> </p>
<img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/CIS_APU_DigitalLabour_PlatypusEssays_SZ_01.jpeg/image_preview" alt="CIS_APU_DigitalLabour_PlatypusEssays_SZ_01" class="image-left image-inline" title="CIS_APU_DigitalLabour_PlatypusEssays_SZ_01" />
<h5>Ridehailing drivers only get the user’s name and pickup location as details about an upcoming trip. <em>Photo by Noopur Raval</em>.</h5>
<p> </p>
<p>Knowing the terms of work—such as when work ends and begins, how the good jobs are being allocated and to whom, and an explanation of one’s income—is a foundation of formal and informal work. Such information is crucial because it allows us to separate our work and personal lives. Knowledge of these obviously quantifiable parameters can help drivers plan their earnings and investments and, crucially, when they can take a break based on much more or less work they have to do in order to meet their income targets.</p>
<p>Furthermore, as drivers showed me, ride-hailing companies spontaneously change the revenue model for “driver-partners” (as they are called) by sending them an SMS right before the change happens, thereby altering trip and mileage targets frequently to keep a degree of unknowability in drivers’ work. This unknowability disincentivizes drivers from going off the road as per their will and helps maintain a steady supply of cabs on the road. As Alex Rosenblat has demonstrated in her study of US Uber and Lyft drivers, they are compelled to accept rides without knowing their profitability. While the app design gives them an option to “choose” to accept or reject a ride, drivers are constrained by lack of adequate information pertaining to the trip as well as the rider in making this choice. The ‘information asymmetry’, as Rosenblat calls it, also feeds into drivers’ mistrust of the companies and their policies (Rosenblat, 2018). Moreover, these feelings and the uncertainty fed by unknowing were not limited to drivers. Passengers also noticed that a ride between two points could cost different prices at different times of day and they were not sure why or how this cost was calculated.</p>
<h3><strong>Unknowability as a form of knowing: A pedagogy of coping</strong></h3>
<p>As I observed in my interactions with drivers online and offline, new drivers often struggled with the degree of uncertainty and unknowability while more experienced drivers had accepted ‘not knowing’ and the opacity of the system as features of their work.</p>
<p> </p>
<img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/CIS_APU_DigitalLabour_PlatypusEssays_SZ_02.jpg/image_preview" alt="CIS_APU_DigitalLabour_PlatypusEssays_SZ_02" class="image-left image-inline" title="CIS_APU_DigitalLabour_PlatypusEssays_SZ_02" />
<h5>Not knowing enough about how much will a ride earn them means drivers are forced to be on the roads, often without a break. <em>Photo by author</em>.</h5>
<p> </p>
<p>Similar to what Rosenblat, Gray et al. and others have observed in the US, in India drivers were constantly engaged in meaning-making through communicative labor, i.e., sharing their experiences with other local drivers online and offline. Agreeing, reassuring, and repeating that drivers actually do not know enough through these discussions also gave them shared confidence in their own abilities and how they were approaching work despite being firmly rooted in unknowing. For instance, when I asked one Uber driver about how ratings worked, they said that all 5-star drivers were matched with 5-star passengers. Another Uber driver said that the higher a passenger’s ratings, the less time they would have to wait for pick-up.</p>
<p>Other forms in which this kind of unknowing manifested was the lack of a fare chart or any minimum or uniform rating system, leaving drivers to offer their own interpretations and coping strategies. For instance, a driver pointed out how very few rides are likely to be available in a specific suburb during hot afternoons and therefore he avoided dropping passengers to that location after 2PM.</p>
<p>How, then, does one learn to cope with such unknowable systems as a worker? And what values does such a pedagogy of coping with algorithmic opacity imbibe? In my fieldwork, apart from answering my questions, drivers were extremely interested in talking about the companies, including news about companies’ stock value, their futures, profits, etc. A persistent rumour in the field was that Reliance, the country’s largest telecom provider, was soon coming up with a competitor ride-hailing app, suggesting that there could be an incentive boom again. In online Facebook groups, drivers often discussed company CEOs’ salaries, comparing them to their own. On the flipside, when videos of ride-hailing and food-delivery drivers getting beaten up or arrested or cheated surfaced, drivers would comment with advice on how to safeguard oneself, how to deal with errant customers and so on. I interpret these practices of making sense of long and short-term work, framed as responses to constant ambiguity and uncertainty, as the development of an “algorithmic gut”.</p>
<p>This gut responds to the anxieties produced by platform infrastructure through a keen awareness of the shifts, the tweaks, the changes and the errors. And it orients how drivers approach and cope with their work by acknowledging that there is a lot unknown (and unknowable) in this kind of daily work. It also guides how drivers focus on the short-term (daily) goal of making profit, such as by tuning into peer groups both online and offline where grievances are discussed, collective action planned, and floating rumours assessed. This gut is an affective, sensorial attunement to how platforms are allocating and shifting power among drivers and plays a generative role in guiding drivers’ work decisions.</p>
<h3><strong>Conclusion</strong></h3>
<p>Uncertainty is an embedded part of a ride-hailing cab’s model of service delivery. For ride-hailing drivers, this ambiguity translates into less control over everyday negotiation of work as well as planning of financial assets for the future.</p>
<p>In my interactions, I discovered that drivers are certain that they will never know more than the company. What this has led to is a driver who is cynical but not entirely pessimistic. Drivers acknowledge that while companies and their structures may be problematic, what will keep them employed is passengers’ appetite for a service like this. They would like to imagine the future of their work but are cognizant of the dual challenge of the present: making money while struggling for self-preservation in order to perform immediate activities. Drivers are cognizant of an ambiguous future and even hesitant to engage in long-term planning. For now, they would prefer better earnings and greater control over how they perform labour. Hence, their focus is on devising specific strategies for known, short-term challenges instead of running after an unknown future.</p>
<h3><strong>Endnotes</strong></h3>
<p>[1] Uber and homegrown Ola both started operations in India as ride-hailing services with the sharing options being added in 2015. Hence, the term ride-hailing has been used to describe these services which also includes ride sharing.</p>
<h3><strong>References</strong></h3>
<p>Davis, Jenny L. 2014. “Triangulating the Self: Identity Processes in a Connected Era.” Symbolic Interaction 37 (4): 500-523.</p>
<p>Dodge, Martin and Kitchin, Rob. 2005. “Codes of life: identification codes and the machine-readable world.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2005 (23): 851-881</p>
<p>Gray, Mary L., et al. 2016. “The Crowd is a Collaborative Network.” Proceedings of the 19th ACM conference on computer-supported cooperative work & social computing. ACM, 2016.</p>
<p>Kitchin, Rob. 2017. “Thinking critically about and researching algorithms.” Information, Communication & Society 20 (1): 14-29.</p>
<p>Lee, Min Kyung, et al. 2015. “Working with Machines: The Impact of Algorithmic and Data-Driven Management on Human Workers.” Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.</p>
<p>Rosenblat, Alex & Stark, Luke. 2016. “Algorithmic Labor and Information Asymmetries: A Case Study of Uber’s Drivers.” International Journal of Communication 10: 3758–3784.</p>
<p>Ruckenstein, Minna and Mika Pantzar. 2017. “Beyond the Quantified Self: Thematic exploration of a dataistic paradigm.” New Media & Society 19(3): 401-418.</p>
<p>Willson, Michele. 2016. “Algorithms (and the) everyday”. Information, Communication & Society 10.1080/1369118X.2016.1200645</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/sarah-zia-not-knowing-as-pedagogy-ride-hailing-drivers-in-delhi'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/sarah-zia-not-knowing-as-pedagogy-ride-hailing-drivers-in-delhi</a>
</p>
No publisherSarah ZiaDigital LabourResearchPlatform-WorkNetwork EconomiesPublicationsResearchers at WorkMapping Digital Labour in India2020-05-19T06:35:21ZBlog EntryBig Data and Reproductive Health in India: A Case Study of the Mother and Child Tracking System
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/big-data-reproductive-health-india-mcts
<b>In this case study undertaken as part of the Big Data for Development (BD4D) network, Ambika Tandon evaluates the Mother and Child Tracking System (MCTS) as data-driven initiative in reproductive health at the national level in India. The study also assesses the potential of MCTS to contribute towards the big data landscape on reproductive health in the country, as the Indian state’s imagination of health informatics moves towards big data.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Case study: <a href="https://github.com/cis-india/website/raw/master/bd4d/CIS_CaseStudy_AT_BigDataReproductiveHealthMCTS.pdf" target="_blank">Download</a> (PDF)</h4>
<hr />
<h3>Introduction</h3>
<p>The reproductive health information ecosystem in India comprises of a range of different databases across state and national levels. These collect data through a combination of manual and digital tools. Two national-level databases have been launched by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare - the Health Management Information System (HMIS) in 2008, and the MCTS in 2009. 4 The MCTS focuses on collecting data on maternal and child health. It was instituted due to reported gaps in the HMIS, which records monthly data across health programmes including reproductive health. There are several other state-level initiatives on reproductive health data that have either been subsumed into, or run in
parallel with, the MCTS.</p>
<p>With this case study, we aim to evaluate the MCTS as data-driven initiative in reproductive health at the national level. It will also assess its potential to contribute towards the big data landscape on reproductive health in the country, as the Indian state’s imagination of health informatics moves towards big data. The methodology for the case study involved a desk-based review of existing literature on the use of health information systems globally, as well as analysis of government reports, journal articles, media coverage, policy documents, and other material on the MCTS.</p>
<p>The first section of this report details the theoretical framing of the case study, drawing on the feminist critique of reproductive data systems. The second section maps the current landscape of reproductive health data produced by the state in India, with a focus on data flows, and barriers to data collection and analysis at the local and national level. The case of abortion data is used to further the argument of flawed data collection systems at the
national level. Section three briefly discusses the state’s imagination of reproductive health policy and the role of data systems through a discussion on the National Health Policy, 2017 and the National Health Stack, 2018. Finally, we make some policy recommendations and identify directions for future research, taking into account the ongoing shift towards big data globally to democratise reproductive healthcare.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/big-data-reproductive-health-india-mcts'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/big-data-reproductive-health-india-mcts</a>
</p>
No publisherambikaBig DataData SystemsResearchers at WorkReproductive and Child HealthResearchFeaturedPublicationsBD4DHealthcareBig Data for Development2019-12-06T04:57:55ZBlog EntryDoing Standpoint Theory
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/doing-standpoint-theory
<b>Feminist research methodology has evolved from different epistemologies, with several different schools of thought. Some of the more popular ones are feminist standpoint theory, feminist empiricism, and feminist relativism. Standpoint theory holds the experiences of the marginalised as the source of ‘truth’ about structures of oppression, which is silenced by traditional objectivist research methods as they produce knowledge from the standpoint of voices in positions of power. In this essay published on the GenderIT website, Ambika Tandon and Aayush Rathi [1] discuss the practical applicability of these epistemologies to research practices in the field of technology and gender.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Cross-posted from <a href="https://www.genderit.org/articles/doing-standpoint-theory" target="_blank">GenderIT</a>, September 1, 2019</h4>
<hr />
<p><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/CatalinaAlzate.jpg/image" alt="Catalina Alzate - Speech Bubbles" class="image-left image-inline" title="Catalina Alzate - Speech Bubbles" /></p>
<h6>Image description: Three speech bubbles on different textures. Artist: <a href="https://www.genderit.org/users/catalina-alzate" target="_blank">Catalina Alzate</a><br /></h6>
<p>Feminist research methodology has evolved from different epistemologies, with several different schools of thought. Some of the more popular ones are feminist standpoint theory, feminist empiricism, and feminist relativism. Standpoint theory holds the experiences of the marginalised as the source of ‘truth’ about structures of oppression, which is silenced by traditional objectivist research methods as they produce knowledge from the standpoint of voices in positions of power [2]. Feminist empiricism does not eschew traditional modes of knowledge production, but emphasises diversity of research participants for feminist (and therefore also rigorous) knowledge production [3]. Relativists have critiqued standpoint theory for its tendency to essentialise the experience of marginalised groups, and subsume them into one homogenous voice to achieve the goal of ‘emancipatory’ research [4]. Relativists instead focus on multiple standpoints, which could be Dalit women, lesbian women, or women with disabilities [5]. We will be discussing the practical applicability of these epistemologies to research practices in the field of technology and gender.</p>
<h4>Standpoint theory holds the experiences of the marginalised as the source of ‘truth’ about structures of oppression, which is silenced by traditional objectivist research methods as they produce knowledge from the standpoint of voices in positions of power.</h4>
<p>As part of the Feminist Internet Research Network, the Centre for Internet and Society is undertaking research on the <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-domestic-work-india-announcement" target="_blank">digital mediation of domestic and care work in India</a>. The project aims to assess shifts in the sector, including conditions of work, brought on by the entry of digital platforms. Our starting point for designing a methodology for the research was standpoint theory, which we thought to be the best fit as the goal of the project was to disrupt dominant narratives of women’s labour in relation to platformisation. In the context of dalit feminis, Rege warns that standpoint research risks producing a narrow frame of identity politics, although it is critical to pay attention to lived experience and the “naming of difference” between dalit women and savarna women [6]. She asserts that neither ‘women’ nor ‘dalit women’ is a homogenous category. While feminist researchers from outside these categories cannot claim to “speak for” those within, they can “reinvent” themselves as dalit feminists and ally themselves with their politics.</p>
<p>In order to address this risk of appropriating the voices of domestic workers (“speaking for”), we chose to directly work with a domestic workers’ union in Bengaluru called Stree Jagruti Smiti. Bengaluru is one of the two cities we are conducting research in (the other being Delhi, with very few registered unions). This is meant to radically destabilise power hierarchies and material relations within the research process, as benefits of participatory research tend to accumulate with the researchers rather than participants [7].</p>
<p>Along with amplifying the voices of workers, a central objective of our project is to question the techno-solutionism that has accompanied the entry of digital platforms into the domestic work sector, which is unorganised and unregulated. To do so, we included companies and state labour departments as participants whose standpoint is to be interrogated. By juxtaposing the standpoints of stakeholders that have differential access to power and resources, the researcher is able to surface various conflicts and intersections in dominant and alternative narratives. This form of research also brings with it unique challenges, as researchers could find themselves mediating between the different stakeholders, while constantly choosing to privilege the standpoint of the least powerful - in this case the workers. Self-reflexivity then becomes necessary to ensure that the project does not slip into an absolutely relativist position, rather using the narratives of workers to challenge those of governments and private actors. This can also be done by ensuring that workers have agency to shape the agenda of researchers, thereby producing research which is instrumental in supporting grassroots campaigns and movements.</p>
<h4>Self-reflexivity then becomes necessary to ensure that the project does not slip into an absolutely relativist position, rather using the narratives of workers to challenge those of governments and private actors.</h4>
<p>Feminist participatory research itself, despite its many promises, is not a linear pathway to empowerment for participants [8]. At the very outset of the project, we were constantly asked the question by domestic workers and unions – why should we participate in this project? Researchers, in their experience, acquire information from the community throughout the process of data collection by positioning themselves as allies. However, as all such engagements are bound to limited timelines and budgets, researchers are then often absent at critical junctures where the community may need external support. We were also told that all too often, the output of the research itself does not make its way back to the participants, making it a one-way process of knowledge extraction. Being mindful of these experiences, we have integrated a feedback loop into our research design, which will allow us to design outputs that are accessible and useful to collectives of domestic workers.</p>
<p>Not only domestic workers and their organisations, many corporations operating these online portals and platforms often questioned the benefits of participating in the project. However, the manner of articulation differed. While attempting to reject the hierarchical nature of the researcher/participant relationship, we increasingly became aware that the underlying power equation was not a monolith. Rather, it varied across stakeholder groups and was explicitly contingent on the socially constructed positionalities already existing outside of the space of the interview. Companies, governments and workers all exemplified varying degrees of engagement with, knowledge of, and contributions to research. Interviews with workers and unions, and even some bootstrapped (i.e. without much external funding) , socially-minded companies, were often cathartic with an expectation of some benefits in return for opening themselves up to researchers. This was quite different for governments and larger companies, as conversations typically adhered to the patriarchal and classed notions of professionalism in sanitised, formal spaces [9] and the strict dichotomy between public and personal spaces. Their contribution seemingly required lesser affective engagement from the interviewee, thereby resulting in lesser investment in the outcome of the research itself.</p>
<p>The cathartic nature of interviews also speak to the impossibility of the distanced, Platonic, school of research. We were often asked politically charged questions, our advice solicited and information sought. Workers and representatives from platform companies alike would question our motivations with the research and challenge us by inquiring about the benefits accruing to us. Again, both set of stakeholders would often ask differently about how other platforms were; workers already registered on a platform would wonder if another platform would be ‘better’ and representatives of platform companies would be curious about competition. This is perhaps a consequence of attempting to design a study that is of use and of interest to the workers we have been reaching out to [10]. At times, we found ourselves at a place in the conversation where we were compelled to respond to political positions for the conversation to continue. There were interviews where notions of caste hierarchies (within oppressed classes) as a justification/complaint for engaging/having to engage in certain tasks would surface. Despite being beholden to a feminist consciousness that disregards the idea of the interviewer as neutral, we often found ourselves only hesitantly forthcoming. At times, it was to keep the interview broadly focused around the research subject, at others it was due to our own ignorance about the research artefact (in this instance, platforms mediating domestic work services). This underscores the challenges of seeing the interview as a value ridden space, where the contradictions between the interview as a data collection method and as a consciousness raising emerged - how could we share information about the artefact we were in the process of collecting data about?</p>
<h4>We were often asked politically charged questions, our advice solicited and information sought.</h4>
<p>The fostering of ‘rapport’ [11] has made its may into method, almost unknowingly. Often, respondents across stakeholder groups started from an initial place of hesitation, sometimes even suspicion. Several structural issues could be at work here - our inability in being able to accurately describe research itself, the class differences and at times, ideological ones as well. While with most participants, rapport was eventually established, its establishment was a laboured process. Especially given that we were using one-off, in-depth interviews as our method, securing an interview was contingent on the establishment of rapport. This isn’t to suggest that feminist research mandatorily requires the ‘doing of rapport’ [12], but that when it does, it’s a fortunate outcome and that feminist researchers engage with it more critically.</p>
<p>Building rapport creates an impression of having minimised the exploitation of the participant, however the underlying politics and pressures of building rapport need to be interrogated. Rapport, like research itself, is at times a performance; rapport is often not naturally occuring. Rather, rapport may also be built to conceal the very structural factors preventing it. For instance, during instances of ideological differences during the interview, we were at times complicit through our silence. This may have been to further a certain notion of ‘objectivity’ itself whereby the building and maintenance of rapport is essential to surfacing a participant’s real views. This then raises the questions: What are the ethical questions that the suppression of certain viewpoints and reactions pose? How does the building, maintenance and continuance of rapport inform the research findings? Rapport, then, comes in all shapes and sizes and its manifold forms implicate the research process differently. Another critical question to be addressed is - why does some rapport take less work than others? With platform companies, building rapport came by easier than it did with workers both on and off platforms. If understood as removing degrees of distance between the researcher and participants, several factors could play into the effort required to build rapport. For instance, language was a critical determinant of the ease of relationship-building. Being more fluent in English than in colloquial Hindi enabled clearer articulation of the research. Further, familiarity with the research process was, as expected, mediated along class lines. This influenced the manner in which we articulated research outcomes and objectives to workers with complete unfamiliarity with the meaning of research. Among workers, this unfamiliarity often resulted in distrust, which required the underlying politics of the research to be more critically articulated.</p>
<p>By and large, the feminist engagement with research methods has been quite successful in its resistance and transformation of traditional forms. Since Oakley’s conception of the interview as a deeply subjective space [13] and Harding’s dialectical conception of masculinist science through its history [14], the application of feminist critical theory has increasingly subverted assumptions around the averseness of research to political motivations. At the same time, it has made knowledge-production occur in a more equitable space. It is in this context that standpoint theory has had wide purchase, but challenges persist in its application. As the foregoing discussion outlines, we have been able to achieve some of the goals of feminist standpoint research while missing out on others. We also found the ‘multiple standpoints’ approach of relativists to be useful in a project involving multiple stakeholders - thereby also avoiding the risk of essentialisation of the identities of domestic workers. However, unlike the tendency of relativists to focus on each perspective as ‘equally valid truth’, we are choosing to focus on the conflicts and intersections between emerging discourses. Through this hybrid theoretical framework, we are seeking to make knowledge production more equitable. At the same time, the discussion around rapport shows that this may nevertheless happen in a limited fashion. Feminist research may never be fully non-extractive. The reflexivity exercised and choices made during the course of the research are key.</p>
<h4>Unlike the tendency of relativists to focus on each perspective as ‘equally valid truth’, we are choosing to focus on the conflicts and intersections between emerging discourses.</h4>
<p> </p>
<h3><strong>Endnotes</strong></h3>
<p>[1] The names of the authors are in alphabetical order.</p>
<p>[2] Harding, S. (2003) The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies, Routledge.</p>
<p>[3] M. Wickramasinghe, Feminist Research Methodology: Making meaning out of meaning-making, Zubaan, 2014</p>
<p>[4] Pease, D. (2000) Researching profeminist men's narratives: participatory methodologies in a postmodern frame. In B. Fawcett, D. Featherstone, J. Fook ll)'ld A. Rossiter (eds) Restarching and Practising in Social Work: Postmodern Feminist Perspectives (London: Routledge).</p>
<p>[5] Stanley, L. and Wise, S. (1983) Breaking Out: Feminist Consciousness and Feminist Research (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul).</p>
<p>[6] Rege, S. 1998. ” Dalit Women Talk Differently: A critique of ‘Difference’ and Towards a Dalit Feminist Standpoint.” Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 33, No.44, pp 39-48.</p>
<p>[7] Heeks, R. and Shekhar, S. (2018) An Applied Data Justice Framework: Analysing Datafication and Marginalised Communities in Cities of the Global South. Working Paper Series, Centre for Development Informatics, University of Manchester.</p>
<p>[8] Stone, E. and Priestley, M. (1996) Parasites, pawn and partners: disability research and the role of nondisabled researchers. British Journal of Sociology, 47(4), 699-716.</p>
<p>[9] Evans, L. (2010). Professionalism, professionality and the development of education professionals. Br. J. Educ. Stud. 56, 20–38. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8527.2007.00392.x</p>
<p>[10] Webb C. Feminist methodology in nursing research. J Adv Nurs. 1984 May;9(3):249-56.</p>
<p>[11] Berger, R. (2015). Now I see it, now I don’t: researcher’s position and reflexivity in qualitative research. Qual. Res. 15, 219–234. doi:10.1177/1468794112468475; Pitts, M. J., and Miller-Day, M. (2007). Upward turning points and positive rapport development across time in researcher-participant relationships. Qual. Res. 7, 177–201. doi:10.1177/1468794107071409</p>
<p>[12] Dunscombe, J., and Jessop, J. (2002). “Doing rapport, and the ethics of ’faking friendship’,” in Ethics in Qualitative Research, eds T. Miller, M. Birch, M. Mauthner, and J. Jessop (London: SAGE), 108–121.</p>
<p>[13] Oakley, A. (1981). “Interviewing women: a contradiction in terms?” in Doing Feminist Research, ed. H. Roberts (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul), 30–61.</p>
<p>[14] Harding, S. (1986). The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/doing-standpoint-theory'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/doing-standpoint-theory</a>
</p>
No publisherAmbika Tandon and Aayush RathiDigital EconomyGenderDigital LabourResearchPublicationsResearchers at WorkDigital Domestic Work2019-12-06T04:59:35ZBlog EntryYou auto-complete me: romancing the bot
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/maya-indira-ganesh-you-auto-complete-me-romancing-the-bot
<b>This is an excerpt from an essay by Maya Indira Ganesh, written for and published as part of the Bodies of Evidence collection of Deep Dives. The Bodies of Evidence collection, edited by Bishakha Datta and Richa Kaul Padte, is a collaboration between Point of View and the Centre for Internet and Society, undertaken as part of the Big Data for Development Network supported by International Development Research Centre, Canada. </b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Please read the full essay on Deep Dives: <a href="https://deepdives.in/you-auto-complete-me-romancing-the-bot-f2f16613fec8" target="_blank">You auto-complete me: romancing the bot</a></h4>
<h4>Maya Indira Ganesh: <a href="https://bodyofwork.in/" target="_blank">Website</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/mayameme" target="_blank">Twitter</a></h4>
<hr />
<p>I feel like Kismet the Robot.</p>
<p>Kismet is a flappy-eared animatronic head with oversized eyeballs and bushy eyebrows. Connected to cameras and sensors, it exhibits the six primary human emotions identified by psychologist Paul Ekman: happiness, sadness, disgust, surprise, anger, and fear.</p>
<p>Scholar Katherine Hayles says that Kismet was built as an ‘ecological whole’ to respond to both humans and the environment. ‘The community,’ she writes, ‘understood as the robot plus its human interlocutors, is greater than the sum of its parts, because the robot’s design and programming have been created to optimise interactions with humans.’</p>
<p>In other words, Kismet may have ‘social intelligence’.</p>
<p>Kismet’s creator Cynthia Breazal explains this through a telling example. If someone comes too close to it, Kismet retracts its head as if to suggest that its personal space is being violated, or that it is shy. In reality, it is trying to adjust its camera so that it can properly see whatever is in front of it. But it is the human interacting with Kismet who interprets this retraction as the robot requiring its own space by moving back. Breazal says, ‘Human interpretation and response make the robot’s actions more meaningful than they otherwise would be.’</p>
<p>In other words, humans interpret Kismet’s social intelligence as ‘emotional intelligence’...</p>
<p>Kismet was built at the start of a new field called affective computing, which is now branded as ‘emotion AI’. Affective computing is about analysing human facial expressions, gait and stance into a map of emotional states. Here is what Affectiva, one of the companies developing this technology, says about how it works:</p>
<p>‘Humans use a lot of non-verbal cues, such as facial expressions, gesture, body language and tone of voice, to communicate their emotions. Our vision is to develop Emotion AI that can detect emotion just the way humans do. Our technology first identifies a human face in real time or in an image or video. Computer vision algorithms then identify key landmarks on the face…[and] deep learning algorithms analyse pixels in those regions to classify facial expressions. Combinations of these facial expressions are then mapped to emotions.’</p>
<p>But there is also a more sinister aspect to this digitised love-fest. Our faces, voices, and selfies are being used to collect data to train future bots to be more realistic. There is an entire industry of Emotion AI that harvests human emotional data to build technologies that we are supposed to enjoy because they appear more human. But it often comes down to a question of social control, because the same emotional data is used to track, monitor and regulate our own emotions and behaviours...</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/maya-indira-ganesh-you-auto-complete-me-romancing-the-bot'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/maya-indira-ganesh-you-auto-complete-me-romancing-the-bot</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroBodies of EvidenceResearchers at WorkResearchPublicationsBD4DBotsBig Data for Development2019-12-06T05:00:19ZBlog EntryData bleeding everywhere: a story of period trackers
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/sadaf-khan-data-bleeding-everywhere-a-story-of-period-trackers
<b>This is an excerpt from an essay by Sadaf Khan, written for and published as part of the Bodies of Evidence collection of Deep Dives. The Bodies of Evidence collection, edited by Bishakha Datta and Richa Kaul Padte, is a collaboration between Point of View and the Centre for Internet and Society, undertaken as part of the Big Data for Development Network supported by International Development Research Centre, Canada.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Please read the full essay on Deep Dives: <a href="https://deepdives.in/data-bleeding-everywhere-a-story-of-period-trackers-8766dc6a1e00" target="_blank">Data bleeding everywhere: a story of period trackers</a></h4>
<h4>Sadaf Khan: <a href="http://mediamatters.pk/the-team/" target="_blank">Media Matters for Democracy</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/nuqsh" target="_blank">Twitter</a></h4>
<hr />
<p>...By now there are a number of questions buzzing around my head, most of them unasked. Are users comfortable with so much of their data being collected? Are there really algorithms that string together all this data into medically-relevant trends? How reliable can these trends be when usage is erratic? Are period tracking apps pioneering, fundamental elements of a future where medical aid is digital and reliable data is inevitably linked to the provision of medical services? And if so, are privacy and health soon to become conflicting rights?</p>
<p>I also want to find out how users understand data collection and privacy before giving apps consent to utilize their data and information as they will. Hareem says she gives apps informed consent. ‘If my data becomes a part of the statistics aiding medical research, why not? There is no harm in it. I am getting a good service, and if my data helps create a better understanding as a part of a larger statistical pool, they are welcome to use it.’</p>
<p>But is she really sure that this information will be used only as anonymised data for medical research? ‘Look at the kind of information that is being collected,’ she answers. ‘Dates, mood, consistency of mucus, basal temperature. What kind of use does one have for this data?’</p>
<p>Naila, in turn, says: ‘Honestly, I have never really thought about what happens to the data the application collects. Obviously I enter detailed information about my cycle and my moods and my sex life. But a), my account is under a fake name and b), even if it wasn’t, who would have any use for stuff like when my period starts and ends and what my mood or digestive system is like at any given moment?’</p>
<p>In fact, this sentiment is shared among all the women interviewed for this piece — what use would anyone have for this data?</p>
<p>As users, we often imagine our own data as anonymised within a huge dataset. But as users, we don’t have enough information about how our data is being used — or will be used in future. The open and at times vague language of a platform’s terms and conditions allows menstrual apps to use data in ways that I may not know of. Some apps continue to hold customer data even after an account is deleted. Even though I may technically ‘agree’ to the terms and conditions, is this fully informed consent?</p>
<p>One of the big concerns around this kind of medical information being collected is the potential for collaborations with big pharmaceuticals and other health service providers. With apps sitting on a goldmine of users’ fertility and health information, health service providers might mine their data for potential consumers and reach out directly to them. While this is like any targeted marketing campaign, the fact that the advertiser is likely to be offering medical services to women suffering from infertility and are at their most vulnerable, raises totally different ethical concerns.</p>
<p>And these apps and their businesses might grow in directions that users haven’t taken into consideration. Take Ovia’s health feature for companies to buy premium services for their employees. While the gesture is packaged as a goodwill one, it also means that an employer has access to extremely private and intimate medical information about their women employees. And while the data set is anonymised, it is still possible to figure out the identity of users based on specific information. For example, how many women in any company are pregnant at any given time?...</p>
<p>Pregnant a year after my miscarriage, I initially downloaded multiple apps in a bid to find a good fit. I don’t know which one of these was in communication with Facebook. But almost immediately, my Facebook timeline started becoming littered with ads for baby stuff — clothes, shoes bibs, prams, cribs, ointments for stretch marks, maternity wear, the works.</p>
<p>It makes me think of those old school clockwork-style videos. You drop a ball and off it goes: making dominos fall, knocking over pots and pans, setting in motion absurd, synchronized mechanisms. Similarly, I drop my data and watch it hurtle into my life, on to other platforms, off to vendors. Maybe to stalkers? To employers? Who knows.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/sadaf-khan-data-bleeding-everywhere-a-story-of-period-trackers'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/sadaf-khan-data-bleeding-everywhere-a-story-of-period-trackers</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroBodies of EvidenceResearchers at WorkResearchFeaturedPublicationsBD4DBig Data for Development2019-12-06T05:03:09ZBlog EntryCan data ever know who we really are?
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/zara-rahman-can-data-ever-know-who-we-really-are
<b>This is an excerpt from an essay by Zara Rahman, written for and published as part of the Bodies of Evidence collection of Deep Dives. The Bodies of Evidence collection, edited by Bishakha Datta and Richa Kaul Padte, is a collaboration between Point of View and the Centre for Internet and Society, undertaken as part of the Big Data for Development Network supported by International Development Research Centre, Canada.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Please read the full essay on Deep Dives: <a href="https://deepdives.in/can-data-ever-know-who-we-really-are-a0dbfb5a87a0" target="_blank">Can data ever know who we really are?</a></h4>
<h4>Zara Rahman: <a href="https://www.theengineroom.org/people/zara-rahman/" target="_blank">The Engine Room</a>, <a href="https://zararah.net/" target="_blank">Website</a>, and <a href="https://twitter.com/zararah" target="_blank">Twitter</a></h4>
<hr />
<blockquote>If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.<br /><em>– <a href="https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1982-audre-lorde-learning-60s/" target="_blank">Audre Lorde</a></em></blockquote>
<p>The proliferation of digital data and the technologies that allow us to gather that data can be used in another way too — to allow us to define for ourselves who we are, and what we are.</p>
<p>Amidst a growing political climate of fear, mistrust and competition for resources, activists and advocates working in areas that are stigmatised within their societies often need data to ‘prove’ that what they are working on matters. One way of doing this is by gathering data through crowdsourcing. Crowdsourced data isn’t ‘representative’, as statisticians say, but gathering data through unofficial means can be a valuable asset for advocates. For example, <a href="http://readytoreport.in/" target="_blank">data collating the experiences of women</a> who have reported incidents of sexual violence to the police in India, can then be used to advocate for better police responses, and to inform women of their rights. Deservedly or not, quantifiable data takes precedence over personal histories and lived experience in getting the much-desired currency of attention.</p>
<p>And used right, quantifiable data — whether it’s crowdsourced or not — can also be a powerful tool for advocates. Now, we can use quantifiable data to prove beyond a question of a doubt that disabled people, queer people, people from lower castes, face intersecting discrimination, prejudice, and systemic injustices in their lives. It’s an unnecessary repetition in a way, because anybody from those communities could have told reams upon reams of stories about discrimination — all without any need for counting.</p>
<p>Regardless, to play within this increasingly digitised system, we need to repeat what we’ve been saying in a new, digitally-legible way. And to do that, we need to collect data from people who have often only ever been de-humanised as data subjects.</p>
<p>Artist and educator Mimi Onuoha writes about <a href="https://points.datasociety.net/the-point-of-collection-8ee44ad7c2fa#.y0xtfxi2p" target="_blank">the challenges that arise while collecting such data</a>, from acknowledging the humans behind that collection to understanding that missing data points might tell just as much of a story as the data that has been collected. She outlines how digital data means that we have to (intentionally or not) make certain choices about what we value. And the collection of this data means making human choices solid, and often (though not always) making these choices illegible to others.</p>
<p>We speak of black boxes when it comes to <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/breaking-the-black-box-what-facebook-knows-about-you" target="_blank">the mystery choices that algorithms make</a>, but the same could be said of the many human decisions that are made in categorising data too, whether that be choosing to limit the gender drop-down field to just ‘male/female’ as with Fitbits, or a variety of apps incorrectly assuming that all people who menstruate <a href="https://medium.com/@maggied/i-tried-tracking-my-period-and-it-was-even-worse-than-i-could-have-imagined-bb46f869f45" target="_blank">also want to know about their ‘fertile window’</a>. In large systems with many humans and machines at work, we have no way of interrogating why a category was merged or not, of understanding why certain anomalies were ignored rather than incorporated, or of questioning why certain assumptions were made.</p>
<p>The only thing we can do is to acknowledge these limitations, and try to use those very systems to our advantage, building our own alternatives or workarounds, collecting our own data, and using the data that is out there to tell the stories that matter to us.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/zara-rahman-can-data-ever-know-who-we-really-are'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/zara-rahman-can-data-ever-know-who-we-really-are</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroBodies of EvidenceBig DataData SystemsResearchers at WorkResearchPublicationsBD4DBig Data for Development2019-12-06T05:02:53ZBlog EntrySilicon Plateau: Volume Two
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/silicon-plateau-volume-two
<b>Silicon Plateau is an art project and publishing series that explores the intersection of technology, culture and society in the Indian city of Bangalore. Each volume of the series is a themed repository for research, artworks, essays and interviews that observe the ways technology permeates the urban environment and the lives of its inhabitants. This project is an attempt at creating collaborative research into art and technology, beginning by inviting an interdisciplinary group of contributors (from artists, designers and writers, to researchers, anthropologists and entrepreneurs) to participate in the making of each volume.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Download the book: <a href="https://files.cargocollective.com/c221119/SiliconPlateau_VolumeTwo.epub">Epub</a> and <a href="https://files.cargocollective.com/c221119/SiliconPlateau_VolumeTwo.pdf">PDF</a></h4>
<hr />
<p><em>Silicon Plateau Volume 2</em> explores the ecosystem of mobile apps and their on-demand services. The book investigates how apps and their infrastructure are impacting our relationship with the urban environment; the way we relate and communicate with each other; and the way labour is changing. It also explores our trust in these technologies, and their supposed capacity to organise things for us and make them straightforward—while, in exchange, we relentlessly feed global corporations with our GPS data and online behaviours.</p>
<p>The sixteen book contributors responded to a main question: what does it mean to be an app user today—as a worker, a client, or simply an observer?</p>
<p>The result is a collection of stories about contemporary life in Bangalore; of conversations and deliberations on how we behave, what we sense, and what we might think about when we use the services that are offered to us on demand, through just a tap on our mobile screens.</p>
<p>Website: <a href="https://siliconplateau.info/" target="_blank">siliconplateau.info</a></p>
<h4>Contributors</h4>
<p>Sunil Abraham and Aasavri Rai, Yogesh Barve, Deepa Bhasthi, Carla Duffett, Furqan Jawed, Vir Kashyap, Saudha Kasim, Qusai Kathawala, Clay Kelton, Tara Kelton, Mathangi Krishnamurthy, Sruthi Krishnan, Vandana Menon, Lucy Pawlak, Nicole Rigillo, Yashas Shetty, Mariam Suhail</p>
<h4>Editors</h4>
<p>Marialaura Ghidini and Tara Kelton</p>
<h4>Publisher</h4>
<p>Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, in collaboration with the Centre for Internet and Society, India, 2018. ISBN: 978-94-92302-29-8</p>
<h4>Book and Cover Design</h4>
<p>Furqan Jawed and Tara Kelton</p>
<h4>Copyediting</h4>
<p>Aditya Pandya</p>
<h4>Supported by</h4>
<p>Jitu Pasricha, Bangalore; Aarti Sonawala, Singapore; and the Centre for Internet and Society, India.</p>
<hr />
<p>Cross-posted from <a href="https://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/silicon-plateau-volume-two/" target="_blank">Institute of Network Cultures</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/silicon-plateau-volume-two'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/silicon-plateau-volume-two</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppSilicon PlateauRAW PublicationsWeb CulturesFeaturedPublicationsResearchers at Work2019-03-13T01:01:27ZBlog EntryNew Contexts and Sites of Humanities Practice in the Digital (Paper)
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/new-contexts-and-sites-of-humanities-practice-in-the-digital-paper
<b>The ubiquitous presence of the ‘digital’ over the couple of decades has brought with it several important changes in interdisciplinary forms of research and knowledge production. Particularly in the arts and humanities, the role of digital technologies and internet has always been a rather contentious one, with more debate spurred now due to the growth of fields like humanities computing, digital humanities (henceforth DH) and cultural analytics. Even as these fields signal several shifts in scholarship, pedagogy and practice, portending a futuristic imagination of the role of technology in academia and practice on the one hand, they also reflect continuing challenges related to the digital divide, and more specifically politics around the growth and sustenance of the humanities disciplines. A specific criticism within more recent debates around the origin story of DH in fact, has been its Anglo-American framing, drawing upon a history in humanities computing and textual studies, and located within a larger neoliberal imagination of the university and academia. While this has been met with resistance from across different spaces, thus calling for more diversity and representation in the discourse, it is also reflective of the need to trace and contextualize more local forms of practice and pedagogy in the digital as efforts to address these global concerns. This essay by Puthiya Purayil Sneha draws upon excerpts from a study on the field of DH and related practices in India, to outline the diverse contexts of humanities practice with the advent of the digital and explore the developing discourse around DH in the Indian context.</b>
<p> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">This essay was published in <a href="http://iias.ac.in/ojs/index.php/summerhill/article/view/116" target="_blank">Vol 22 No 1 (2016): SummerHill</a>, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. Edited by Dr. Bindu Menon. Download the essay <a href="http://iias.ac.in/ojs/index.php/summerhill/article/view/116/99" target="_blank">here</a> (PDF).</p>
<hr />
<h3><strong>Abstract</strong></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The last couple of decades have seen an increasing prevalence of digital technologies and internet in the study and practice of arts and humanities. With the growth of fields like humanities computing, digital humanities (henceforth DH) and cultural analytics, there has been a renewed interest in the increasing role of the ‘digital’ in interdisciplinary forms of research and knowledge production. DH in particular has become a field of much interest and debate in different parts of the world, including in India. Globally, in the last two decades, there have been several efforts to organize the discourse around this field which seeks to explore various intersections between humanities and digital methods, spaces and tools1. But DH also continues to remain a bone of contention, with several perspectives on what exactly constitutes its methodology and scope, and most importantly its epistemological stake.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">A specific criticism has been the Anglo-American framing of DH, located within a larger neoliberal imagination of the university and the higher education system at large. As a result, the connection of these two threads—a history of DH located in humanities computing and textual studies and its contextualization within the American university—is often represented as the history of DH. This has been met with resistance from several scholars and practitioners across the world calling for more global perspectives on the field. Drawing upon excerpts from a recently completed study on mapping the field of DH and related practices in India, this essay will attempt to outline the diverse contexts of humanities practice emerging with the digital turn, along with a reading of some of the global debates around DH to understand the discourse around the field in the Indian context.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/new-contexts-and-sites-of-humanities-practice-in-the-digital-paper'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/new-contexts-and-sites-of-humanities-practice-in-the-digital-paper</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppDigital KnowledgeResearchFeaturedPublicationsDigital HumanitiesResearchers at Work2019-12-06T05:03:33ZBlog EntryMaking Humanities in the Digital: Embodiment and Framing in Bichitra and Indiancine.ma
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/making-humanities-in-the-digital-embodiment-and-framing-in-bichitra-and-indiancine.ma
<b>The growth of the internet and digital technologies in the last couple of decades, and the emergence of new ‘digital objects’ of enquiry has led to a rethinking of research methods across disciplines as well as innovative modes of creative practice. This chapter authored by Puthiya Purayil Sneha (published in 'Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities' edited by Jentery Sayers) discusses some of the questions that arise around the processes by which digital objects are ‘made’ and made available for arts and humanities research and practice, by drawing on recent work in text and film archival initiatives in India.</b>
<p> </p>
<p>Through an exploration of an online film archive, Indiancine.ma, and a digital variorum of Rabindranath Tagore’s works, Bichitra, developed at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, the chapter engages with the processes of making and studying digital objects as creative and analytical, affective, and embodied. Drawing also on observations from a study on mapping digital humanities work in India, the chapter explores conceptual and material processes of the digital to understand how they affect research and practice in the humanities. These also allow for a new perspectives to understand the condition of digitality we inhabit today, as well as the possibilities it offers for the humanities.</p>
<hr />
<p>This chapter authored by Puthiya Purayil Sneha was published in <a class="external-link" href="https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/making-things-and-drawing-boundaries"><strong>Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities</strong></a> (2017), edited by Jentery Sayers, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, London.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/making-humanities-in-the-digital-embodiment-and-framing-in-bichitra-and-indiancine.ma'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/making-humanities-in-the-digital-embodiment-and-framing-in-bichitra-and-indiancine.ma</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppResearchFeaturedPublicationsDigital HumanitiesResearchers at Work2018-06-25T12:50:36ZBlog EntryExploring Big Data for Development: An Electricity Sector Case Study from India
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/exploring-big-data-for-development-an-electricity-sector-case-study-from-india
<b>This working paper by Ritam Sengupta, Dr. Richard Heeks, Sumandro Chattapadhyay, and Dr. Christopher Foster draws from the field study undertaken by Ritam Sengupta, and is published by the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester. The field study was commissioned by the CIS, with support from the University of Manchester and the University of Sheffield.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Download the working paper: <a href="http://hummedia.manchester.ac.uk/institutes/gdi/publications/workingpapers/di/di_wp66.pdf" target="_blank">PDF</a></h4>
<hr />
<h3><strong>Abstract</strong></h3>
<p>This paper presents exploratory research into “data-intensive development” that seeks to inductively identify issues and conceptual frameworks of relevance to big data in developing countries. It presents a case study of big data innovations in “Stelcorp”; a state electricity corporation in India. In an attempt to address losses in electricity distribution, Stelcorp has introduced new digital meters throughout the distribution network to capture big data, and organisation-wide information systems that store and process and disseminate big data.</p>
<p>Emergent issues are identified across three domains: implementation, value and outcome. Implementation of big data has worked relatively well but technical and human challenges remain. The advent of big data has enabled some – albeit constrained – value addition in all areas of organisational operation: customer billing, fault and loss detection, performance measurement, and planning. Yet US$ tens of millions of investment in big data has brought no aggregate improvement in distribution losses or revenue collection. This can be explained by the wider outcome, with big data faltering in the face of external politics; in this case the electoral politics of electrification. Alongside this reproduction of power, the paper also reflects on the way in which big data has enabled shifts in the locus of power: from public to private sector; from labour to management; and from lower to higher levels of management.</p>
<p>A number of conceptual frameworks emerge as having analytical power in studying big data and global development. The information value chain model helps track both implementation and value-creation of big data projects. The design-reality gap model can be used to analyse the nature and extent of barriers facing big data projects in developing countries. And models of power – resource dependency, epistemic models, and wider frameworks – are all shown as helping understand the politics of big data.</p>
<hr />
<em>Cross-posted from <a href="http://www.gdi.manchester.ac.uk/research/publications/other-working-papers/di/di-wp66/">University of Manchester</a>.</em>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/exploring-big-data-for-development-an-electricity-sector-case-study-from-india'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/exploring-big-data-for-development-an-electricity-sector-case-study-from-india</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroBig DataData SystemsResearchers at WorkResearchFeaturedPublicationsBig Data for Development2019-03-16T04:33:15ZBlog Entry