Delhi’s “platforms of trust” favor middle-class passengers, ignoring power asymmetries and devaluing taxi drivers in gig work.
Author
Anurag Mazumdar, Assistant Professor, Jindal School of Liberal Arts and Humanities, O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana, India
Summary
This article illustrates how Delhi’s ground-up alternatives to digital taxi platforms, which I call “platforms of trust,” privilege the trustworthiness of middle-class passengers over taxi drivers in a city with deep social inequalities. Based on fieldwork with taxi drivers and passengers in Delhi, I highlight two ethnographic narratives that suggest why, despite unmaking dominant platform narratives, platform alternatives remain emplaced in classed and gendered devaluation of gig workers. First, alternative platforms complicate the boundary work of taxi drivers vis-à-vis Delhi’s ‘notorious’ autorickshaw culture. Second, alternative taxi platforms do not address how trust cultures in Delhi are enmeshed in asymmetries of information and power between drivers and passengers. I argue that platforms of trust remain abstracted from the power dynamics of trust formation and reinforce the technological optimism that threats from the urban underclass must be countered through digital platforms.
Published in: Geoforum
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