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India's "Uberwallah": profiling Uber drivers in the gig economy

Published: 04 January 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Narratives of the gig economy are largely perspectives from the global North and the nature of their ride-hailing market. Freelancing or gigging offer contrasting connotations depending on the market and the labour it is situated in. India, with its demographic dividend and employment challenges, view opportunities arising out of the gig- economy differently. To investigate the impact of ride-hailing apps in the Indian market, and the challenges and opportunities it has brought in, we offer learnings from an ethnographic study of Uber drivers in India.

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  • (2024)Coping with crisis and precarity in the gig economy: ‘Digitally organised informality’, migration and socio-spatial networks among platform drivers in IndiaEnvironment and Planning A: Economy and Space10.1177/0308518X23122029656:4(1227-1244)Online publication date: 31-Jan-2024
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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    ICTD '19: Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development
    January 2019
    422 pages
    ISBN:9781450361224
    DOI:10.1145/3287098
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 04 January 2019

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    Author Tags

    1. India
    2. Uber
    3. contract labour
    4. employment
    5. ethnography

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    • (2024)Unveiling Two-Fold Gamification: Exploring the Agency Of DeliveryWorkers in Urban IndiaProceedings of the 7th ACM SIGCAS/SIGCHI Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies10.1145/3674829.3675066(117-126)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
    • (2024)Caste, gig-economy, and youth: the resurgence of a new age caste politics in urban GujaratSouth Asian History and Culture10.1080/19472498.2024.234686715:2(231-246)Online publication date: 2-May-2024
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    • (2024)Socio‐technical issues in the platform‐mediated gig economy: A systematic literature reviewJournal of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/asi.24868Online publication date: 8-Jan-2024
    • (2023)The Work to Make Piecework Work: An Ethnographic Study of Food Delivery Work in India During the COVID-19 PandemicProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36100347:CSCW2(1-23)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2023
    • (2023)Introduction of Electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing System with Systemigram Approach2023 18th Annual System of Systems Engineering Conference (SoSe)10.1109/SoSE59841.2023.10178673(1-8)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2023
    • (2023)Introduction: Children, Youth, and Modernity in the ‘Everyday Urban’Childhood and Youth in India10.1007/978-3-031-31820-7_1(1-30)Online publication date: 21-Jul-2023
    • (2022)Analysing the Gig Economy in India and Exploring Various Effective Regulatory Methods to Improve the Plight of the WorkersJournal of Asian and African Studies10.1177/0021909622108258157:7(1343-1356)Online publication date: 8-Mar-2022
    • (2022)Automating Care: Online Food Delivery Work During the CoVID-19 Crisis in IndiaProceedings of the 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency10.1145/3531146.3533082(160-172)Online publication date: 21-Jun-2022
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