Coping with crisis and precarity in the gig economy: ‘Digitally organised informality’, migration and socio-spatial networks among platform drivers in India

The most recent phase of services digitalisation in the global South, reflected in the widespread adoption of Internet and smart-phone technologies, has given rise to an emergent gig economy that employs tens of millions of workers across its diverse urban centres. Pre-eminent frames of analysing the global gig economy have thus far focussed significantly on issues related to platform regulation, employment relations and labour organisation. While important, these frames tend to overlook the wider informal, unwaged and self-organised foundations of gig work and labour in the global South. This article addresses the limitations of existing analytical frames by drawing upon the analysis of 55 telephonic interviews with migrant and non-migrant gig workers associated with well-known ride-hailing and home-delivery apps across two Indian cities about their experiences of the COVID-19 crisis. The article offers novel insights into the various uncertainties and challenges that gig workers in India faced during the COVID-19 national lockdown, as well as their attempts to cope with the new post-pandemic realities. Contextualising these experiences through the lens of ‘digitally organised informality’, the article reveals that in the absence of formal and institutionalised systems, India’s gig workers rely significantly on informal socio-spatial networks of care and support that also link internal urban-rural geographies, lives and livelihoods. Conceptualising these informal networks as fundamentally contextual in understanding the development of gig labour and its social reproduction in the global South, the article however also provides a critical evaluation of their partial and contradictory nature.