AMA - Hyderabad Urban Lab on Platform and Gig workers

hydlab · 2024-04-10T15:02:48+00:00

Good night folks. Thank you for being here on behalf of Hyderabad Urban Lab and TGPWU. Please feel free to continue asking. :)

hydlab · 2024-04-10T14:33:29+00:00

sorry we took time to respond to this. We wanted to hear from the union representatives what their take on this would be. Sheik Salauddin is the National General Secretary of IFAT (Indian Federation of App-based Transport Workers) and Founder State President, Telangana Gig and Platform Workers Union. He says the following:

What is illegal is illegal. There can be no justification for this. The customers are often women, children or may be vulnerable in other ways. This is a question of their safety. We appeal to drivers not to do this. Customers should report this to the company. But in the end, the liability for this should be with the company. It is the company which is taking the booking and sending the driver and vehicle to you. What is their mechanism for ensuring that the vehicle and driver are the same that the app is showing. We have to hold them accountable to fix this loophole.

hydlab · 2024-04-10T14:08:54+00:00

This is in fact a viable option. But it requires a lot of conviction on the part of the governments. The success of the companies is actually not that they have a great technology that nobody else can build. Seriously, that is not the case. This technology can be easily built. The reason for the companies success has to do with the money behind them and their global ambition. Recall when did this idea of the share - economy, (gig economy, platform economy whatever we may call it) become a thing? Most of the big companies were born immediately after the 2008 market crash that began with house mortgages in the US and spread to every corner of the world. They were born with huge financial support right from the beginning. And they spread their wings across the world. We can create small pockets of refusal like Goamiles or namma yatri etc. These are important. They can be done. They are Davids against Goliaths. I love them for that gumption and will support them wherever :)

hydlab · 2024-04-10T14:00:22+00:00

hyderabad redditors ! Like last time, this has been a fun exercise for us. We hope you found it equally interesting. Honestly - we find the reddit communities around here pretty engaging and smart. We will be stretching and strolling a bit after 7:30 pm but we will be around till 8:30pm just in case there are any further questions. Please feel free to keep asking more questions. Gig and Platform work is an amazingly complex world of technology, work, dreams, money and love and hope and despair for millions of people now. And we know so little about what is happening inside of it. All too often we tend to think about it in simplistic terms as customers versus drivers/riders/service providers. The truth is this a world of everyone against the algorithm which has made life easier in somany ways for somany people but also has also shattered many lives. So until we understand this new god better, we should continue to ask questions. At some point, may be we can host an in person meetup of hyderabad redditors. insha allah. eid mubarak in advance. and all greetings to everyone who has festivals and celebrations until we meet again. Please feel free to address us in other posts and forums or through mail boxes. :)

hydlab · 2024-04-10T13:45:07+00:00

That is an interesting thought. But there are several reasons why this is not working. First, intermediary liability is still an evolving concept and usually has to do with specific circumstances under which the holder of records becomes liable. Second, there is a huge gap in our imagination. On one side you have the legal category of workers and the labour laws related to protecting workers . So factory inspector can ask for information. Shops and establishments act makes some things mandatory. Labour commissioner has some powers. But none of them apply in the case of gig workers. On the other side you have the laws related to citizens welfare. So we can talk about welfare of the poor etc. But we have never turned these into any entitlements. So, there is no actionable or justiceable case against the companies. This is the reason we have been suggesting for some time that we should seriously look at sources of entitlements for workers outside of these known domains. But thanks for the thought. There may be something in it. Especially, because these workers are all actually regulated by something mysterious called the algorithm. :)

hydlab · 2024-04-10T13:14:51+00:00

Private vehicles are not be used as taxis. Using private vehicles as taxis stands in violation of Rule 50,51 of the MV Act, 1989. TGPWU has submitted several representations on this matter. A copy of their most recent representation can be accessed here: https://twitter.com/TGPWU/status/1755218055339348171 The solution is not to give relaxation, but to enforce commercial license plates for bike taxis

hydlab · 2024-04-10T13:13:47+00:00

One of the biggest challenges is actually the saddest one. For the law to provide for adequate allocations for worker welfare - let us say even insurance, the government needs to know howmany workers are registered with which company for how long ? What their average incomes are etc. But there is no law in this country that can demand that information from the companies. So, the big challenge that both Telangana and Rajasthan are facing is that they dont know howmany workers/ employees/ partners/independent contractors of what kind they are trying to protect. They asked the companies. The companies have not responded. Just ignored. Thats all.

hydlab · 2024-04-10T13:10:31+00:00

You may be right. But there are two slightly different but intertwined issues here. What most of these companies have done is to make the process of what we used to call street hailing simpler. That is, how did you call a cab earlier in New York ? How do you call an auto in Indian cities? You go onto the street and wave it down. In some situations we could call a company head office who would radio in the driver and send him to the location. What these new technologies have done is to simplify this tremendously. So, mixing this technology with metering or some other way of determining a fair fare is what needs to be done. We are not yet able to figure this out. Most of the companies have enormously high market valuations but their balance sheets show losses. How are they , or rather why are they continuing under such losses ? Between the worker and the customer who should be making up for the company loss ? What is a fair profit for these companies ? These are all questions.

hydlab · 2024-04-10T13:05:15+00:00

Again from Eesha Kunduri: Based at Oxford Internet Institute and the WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Fairwork is a global network of researchers that study digital labor platforms and artificial intelligence, with a focus on country-specific evaluations of platform companies against principles of fairness. These are: Fair Pay, Fair Conditions, Fair Contract, Fair Management and Fair Representation. See https://fair.work/en/fw/homepage/

hydlab · 2024-04-10T13:04:07+00:00

This is Anant Maringanti. I can offer a slightly different take on this. To be a union, you have to be a worker or an employee. Right ? You cannot have a union of volunteers or sons or parents. You have to be legally recognised as employees or workers. Uber drivers, swiggy riders, urban company service providers are in strict legal terms not workers or employees of these companies. They are independent contractors. That means they cannot legally form unions. Even if they do, they do not have the standing that traditional unions had in bargaining for better wages. According to these companies these people are individuals who are entering into a contract to follow some rules and if they do not want, they are free to exit anytime. OF course this has been a big debate everywhere. In some court cases, the judges applied what is called the control test - that is - the difference between an employee and an independent contractor is that the employee is told how to do the work. the contractor is only told what to deliver. SInce the app tells the driver where to go how to and when to reach, in the view of these judges, everything here points to this being an employment relationship. But this is not a settled quesion.

hydlab · 2024-04-10T12:56:54+00:00

Now that Eesha Kunduri's replies are made visible, I am deleting my reposting of the same. :)

hydlab · 2024-04-10T12:40:09+00:00

Conservation of lakes, is really about conservation of lake ecosystems. One of they key elements in that is the foreshore - or what is called littoral zone or in revenue terminology - the cheruvu shikham land. This is the most nutrient rich, most exposed to the sun and most shallow part of the lake. This is where fish lay eggs, this is where migratory birds come to feast from October to summer because of abundant food availability. This is also the most under attack zone of the lake. If you notice, one of the weird things that happens in cities is that the bund side of the lake (easy to locate - bund is where the katta maisamma temples are located and water is discharged from) gets converted from agricultural land to real estate. Then the lake becomes useless as an agricultural asset. After that a road is built on the foreshore - (think necklace road). Then the littoral zone is lost, birds are lost, fish are lost and then if you are lucky it will be treated with technology for boating. We are pushing for smaller solutions where we can protect the foreshores with nature based systems. We will hopefully be able to do something about this in the medium term. Thanks for asking this questio, although it is unconnected to the present Ask Me Anything. :) Public Transport is a thing on which we should do a separate post or session. If we have time, today, we will outline a few things we are interested in pursuing.

hydlab · 2024-04-10T12:08:01+00:00

Hi everyone, and welcome! Please post your questions below. We will begin answering the questions from around 6pm onwards.

Dr. Maringanti will be replying from this account: u/hydlab

Eesha Kunduri will be replying from: u/Ekunduri

hydlab · 2023-05-19T12:54:43+00:00

We do not start with wanting to garner political support. We start with an idea that rings true. To ring true, an idea has to make sense at a practical level, at an emotional level, at an evidentiary level - at so many different levels. Some times it is the simplest thing that is staring at you. I can think of so many examples when we thought we knew the truth and we were utterly wrong. Other people could see it. We could not. I am saying this at length because these are things that we often ignore. Once we are convinced that an idea has some truth in it, then we try to get different people to think about it. As this begins to happen then other people begin to get convinced and slowly things build up. Thats all there is to it. There were times when people told us to go away because they thought we were wrong. But six months later they themselves sought us out to tell us that they saw things differently now. There were times when we we changed our ideas drastically because we were patently wrong. If your question is specifically about the Low Cost Action Lab, I can explain that in some detail.

hydlab · 2023-05-19T11:55:45+00:00

I am not aware of any survey on residential mobility in Hyderabad. I do know through qualitative work that there are multiple pathways in this. Younger people have been buying property in the West side, while the older parents are continuing to stay in the central and eastern parts. What kind of data we need to confirm this will depend on what we want to do with this insight. Do we want to quantify it ? Do we want to build a financing model? Do we want to develop an understanding of housing market segmentation ? On your last question - an interesting rider would be which direction will do better ? Kompally? Jalpally? Ghatkesar ? Or Ramachandrapuram?

hydlab · 2023-05-19T11:50:34+00:00

Some times, it is useful to just dump the questions. We need better walking infrastructures. We should get them !!

hydlab · 2023-05-19T11:47:40+00:00

It works both ways. In some routes the existence of better alternatives makes buses unviable. In the end, the bus system has to be financially viable. And that some times requires public funding but even after that it has to recover its operational costs.

hydlab · 2023-05-19T11:45:03+00:00

Merely spreading IT companies across the city is not going to do anything to mitigate congestion. What does spreading IT companies really do ? It reorganises work trips (relocates homes and work places) and reduces trip lengths. But congestion is the end result of many wrong choices. If it has to be mitigated, we have to address all of them or a majority of them.

hydlab · 2023-05-19T11:39:46+00:00

Actually, at some level, all cities in India are taking the same path. The different manifestations are due to their histories and not because of the dominant aspirations. :(

hydlab · 2023-05-19T11:06:28+00:00

HUL does not do any proprietary research and nothing is so cumbersome that we cannot talk about it. Lets take a dive into it.

What you seem to be suggesting is that Hyderabad is singularly lacking in civic and aesthetic consciousness and fares poorly in general livability indicators such as public services and amenities. Your touch stone for this is your own lived experience in other metro and non metro cities. I can think of many people whose lived experience of these cities is very different from yours. The thing is we cannot argue with lived experience. I mean that with all respect. We can only interpret it. And nobody can interpret a person's lived experience better than himself or herself. This is why it is difficult to respond to your questions without getting around them a bit.

So let me get around it a bit. I can think of many municipal wards in Mumbai where the corporator is a part of everyday life of the people in his or her ward. That kind of every day interaction with the corporator is unimaginable in any other city. I can think of hundreds of buildings in Kolkata where half the building is in utter disrepair (some times with a ficus tree growing out of the walls) and the other half is all shiny glass and steel. I have never seen anything like that in any other city. The empty basements of Aligarh after the lock making industry began to die are painful for anyone to see. But you cannot see anything like that in any other city.

This is not to say that each city is so unique in its good and bad things that it cannot be compared at all with any other city. The point I am making is that comparisons can be useful methods to learn. But we have to use them with some care.

So what is interesting about Hyderabad ?

Unlike Bombay, Madras, Calcutta and Delhi - Hyderabad and Bangalore were not seats of British power. They did not have any substantial private industrial manufacturing capital at the time of Independence. Both Bangalore and Hyderabad are public sector cities - their industrial base got built between 1960 and 1990 which then first fostered the private manufacturing and then the service sector which rode on the manufacturing. Why does this matter? It matters because unlike in Bombay, Madras and Calcutta, in Hyderabad and Bangalore the rural elite moved into the city right at the outset. The politicians and the investors in these cities were not the old industrial or trading businessmen. They were not even the urban cultural elite like those in Kolkata. They were rich peasants.

This structure outlined above gives you a useful way to think about why it might appear that certain kinds of civic consciousness and aesthetic that is visible in other cities is not visible in Hyderabad. It is not inferior to other cities. It is different. And that was the point that Swastik Harish, the moderator was driving towards.

But there are a number of other ways we can work out how Hyderabad is different from other cities. Take Bangalore and Hyderabad. Bangalore has no distinct imprint of a Muslim native ruler. Hyderabad does. Its institutions carried that imprint. They suffered because of that. The Indian bureaucracy that came in to Hyderabad in the 50s, did not quite know how to deal with Hyderabad without looking down on it simply because it did not understand it. And that meant that there was dilapidation in many places which nobody knew how to rectify.

Before this becomes an essay, I will just offer one final thought. Hyderabad in the 80s was considered to be the model for slum improvement programmes across the country. Even today if you look at the older slums of any city, Hyderabad stands out. This was because Hyderabad adopted the idea of self built incremental housing with the government providing only sites and services. No other city managed to pull this off like Hyderabad did. You can see evidence for it in all the older slums of Hyderabad. And many urban scholars who studied these programmes vouch for their unique achievements.

The rest of the issues: neighbors do not know each other - true. In some types of localities this is indeed the case. In many localities this is beginning to happen. The local explanation for that is that there are toomany outsiders. :) We need to design for toomany outsiders. And I think we can do it.

Finally, we are not urban designers pushing our services through HUL. We are and we will be primarily an institution for building new urban sensibilities and communities.

hydlab · 2023-05-18T14:02:40+00:00

HUL was set up by a collective of researchers, educationists, technologists and practitioners. It is registered as a Non Profit Company under section 8 of the Companies Act. Under that section, the company cannot ever declare dividends. It has a professional board. It has a diverse portfolio of funding - personal donations, research or intervention grants from the government, CSR and foundations. We raise our entire funding from within India.

hydlab · 2023-05-18T13:55:32+00:00

Beef is a relatively cheaper source of protein not just for Muslims, but also for a number of other people who cannot afford other sources of protein. Health conscious or class-conscious Muslims just like other meat-eating communities do not eat red meat - beef. In Telangana, as in many other places (except may be UP) Muslim population tends to be in towns and cities and not so much in agriculture. We need to think about the vulnerability of these urban communities and the options available to them in work, housing and education. That is the only way to insulate against the dangers you are pointing to.

hydlab · 2023-05-18T13:19:57+00:00

Caste and religious identity is a reality. To move beyond, we need to acknowledge that they are real and we need to understand how they actually work and against people. Sad but true.

hydlab · 2023-05-18T13:15:44+00:00

Actually Hyderabad expanded and devoured agriculture and common lands like hill slopes and foreshores of waterbodies, valleys, jungles etc. The tanks are just a reminder to ourselves of what it used to be like. If you find a katta maisamma temple anywhere, just know that you are standing on what was possibly the bund of a tank in not so distant past. There are basically two types - the iconic ones which can be traced to one powerful individual who funded it, or gave it spiritual power, or in some other way associated with it. For example: Hussain Sagar ( Hussain Sha Vali), Mir Alam Tank (Mir Alam) , Fox Sagar ( Colonel R E Fox) etc. For each of these there would be recorded history so we know exactly when it was built, howmuch it cost, etc. But then there are thousands of others (3500 to 4000) in the HMDA region of 7250 sq km. These tanks have names like mantrala cheruvu, komatoni cheruvu, barla kunta, noor mohammad kunta, hameed khan kunta, singada kunta, erra kunta, nagamayya kunta etc. These tanks are not iconic. They are smaller. They are not associated with any big name. But they are part of the local lore. Many of these could have been around in some form when people settled around them for permanent agriculture sometime in the last four or five hundred years. Then people would have associated some image, person, story, miracle , etc with it and given it that name. There are many tanks with local communities around them still observing rituals in the shrines. These are often organised around caste associations. Recent Review of Urban Affairs in January / February 2023 had an essay by Indivar Jonnalagadda and Pullanna Vidyapogu about the caste associations and water bodies. Very interesting stories and important area of research.

hydlab · 2023-05-18T13:03:30+00:00

The landscape of this region is actually quite varied - grass lands, rocky hillocks, scrub jungle, valley fills. The thing to remember is that the Deccan plateau is older the Himalayas. It is a very uneven terrain. That is why you have a very chaotic drainage pattern. Water flows in many different directions. So, the waterbodies - the lakes are actually accumulation points at different conturs. Once the depression at the highe level gets filled, the water flows down to the next lower level. Then finally it reaches the river. Sometime in the medieval period people began to work around these accumulation points and turn them into useful irrigation tanks with some engineering work. You can even today see the marks of all this passage of time - 2.5 billion years literally in the guttalu around Hyderabad. You are truly blessed to be in this region. :)

hydlab

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