The Finnish platform Wolt, which provides food and retail delivery services in over twenty countries, released a report called 'Algorithmic Transparency Report' in 2022 to address criticisms of non-transparency, a first of its kind in the industry. One of its assurances is that the platform does not use any ranking or rating to determine which courier partner is offered a delivery task, except proximity and the type of vehicle the partner is using.

Platform Labor is a research project funded by the European Research Council that aims to determine how digital platforms are transforming the organization of labour, especially in cities marked by eroding welfare systems. Niels van Doorn, the principal investigator of the project who also teaches at the University of Amsterdam, has many more questions he thinks Wolt needs to answer. At the 2022 'Reshaping Work' conference in Amsterdam, he demanded to know why Wolt has decided to opt for a dynamic pricing system. How much is the base fee per delivery in each market, and how many cents per kilometre do partners get as part of the 'distance fee' in different markets? How often are fee calculations updated, and what new data inputs or metrics are they based on? How come distance is calculated as the crow flies, but the actual distance varies due to city conditions? Why aren't they paid for time spent in the restaurant waiting or for the kilometres travelled to the restaurant, why only to the customer's house?

There aren't many answers to this barrage of questions, which workers in India are just beginning to ask. But there is hope that a few leaders have emerged among gig workers who are mobilizing them and knocking on the doors of the government and the public at large, urging them to hear their side of the digital commerce story.

Amberpet is one of the oldest suburbs of Hyderabad, adjacent to Osmania University. The locality gets its name from the Sufi saint Hazrat Amber Shah Baba, whose dargah is located there. A local belief is that this was a barren land that miraculously transformed into verdant fruit-growing fields after the saint made this place his final resting place. Today, Amberpet is a dusty, grey area, with metro construction adding to the pollution and a general air of neglect characteristic of the inner localities of Indian cities. I have driven down fifty kilometres to Amberpet to meet Shaikh Salauddin, the National General Secretary of the Indian Association of App-based Transport Workers and founder President of the Telangana Gig and Platform Workers Union.

In the recent past in India, leaders among the gig workers have been herding them together, highlighting their issues to policymakers and pushing for reforms. Salauddin is the tallest among such leaders, who noticed long before anyone else that something was not quite right with a model where the worker was flattened between the customer and the firm.

This was my second meeting with Salauddin. The previous year, Kamala Marius, a geography professor from the University of Bordeaux and I had chatted with him over lunch at the Taj Deccan for a study on gender differences in ride-hailing usage in Hyderabad. She had heard that he was the go-to man for anything to do with the gig economy.

Salauddin is a soft-spoken man who, with his pleasant demeanour, appears like a bank officer rather than an influential union leader. But since our previous meeting, Salauddin's stature has grown manifold. Suddenly, he seemed to be everywhere -- on the front flap of The Times of India and virtually any article on the gig economy in India. He was being given lavish monikers like 'the most powerful Uber driver in India'.

Despite that, his office is a sparsely furnished room above a mutton shop. A banner announcing a scholarship scheme for children of drivers working for ride-sharing companies is the lone decoration on the walls. He tells me that life has indeed been busy. Some time ago, he was flown into IIT Mumbai by a professor who was researching this topic. A business school was making a documentary on gig workers and wanted to feature him. He had just met with Ashok Gehlot, Chief Minister of Rajasthan, who had a battery of officials to sit in the room and hear Salauddin, although it was 10 p.m. This meeting was an offshoot of an encounter with Rahul Gandhi, where Salauddin had rushed to the suburb of Sanga Reddy on a tip-off that there was a possibility to speak to Gandhi there.

Salauddin's angst is that too many workers' lives are hinging on a few platforms pulling the wool over everyone's eyes, including the government's. 'I am telling the government don't make us so dependent on private players like Ola/Uber/Rapido. What if they wrap up and go? 1,25,000 drivers will be on the streets. So, the government should have its own taxis with digital meters under the Smart City mission. There should be some backup for drivers. At least fifty people are doing PhDs on the gig economy. Every day, I spend one or two hours with someone from XLRI, IIT or some foreign university. Where is all this knowledge going -- of PhDs in the transport sector? Why are they not able to innovate and bring something new? For so many years, there has been only Ola's Bhavish Agarwal and Uber!' ...

'Government should cap how many cars and two wheelers can ply. If there isn't enough work, why put up ads to call drivers and leave them sitting in their cars? Ola, Swiggy and Zomato are all eyeing IPOs. For an IPO, the company must show how many workers are employed and how much business is generated. There isn't as much business as they project. Daant hathi ke dikhane ke alag, chabane ke alag (an elephant has different sets of teeth for chewing and for display -- this adage seeks to highlight the gulf between perception and reality).'

I ask him what these workers would have done had they not been part of the gig economy.

'They would have been farmers or plied the trade that they know -- like carpentry. They were getting more money and working apne marzi mafiq (according to their convenience)! If you want to earn well in this gig, you can't work when you please; you must be on the grind. These guys can't leave because they are used to city life. They go back only when there is a crisis here. Like in the lockdown, they returned to the village, worked on their field, fixed their houses and returned when things became okay.'

The most fascinating form of mobilization is the way workers are using technology to beat technology. Social media, particularly WhatsApp, is being deployed to potent effect to rage against platforms, react to perceived injustices, galvanize peer groups and rant at the system. I was included in the WhatsApp group of one section of north India's workers. It gave me a voyeur's view of the agency technology gave workers, enabling them to group themselves and break out of the isolation inherent to their jobs.

'Private cars are becoming Uber cabs, which is eating into our incomes,' says a cautionary forward. Cabs in India require a commercial licence as per the law, and private cars plying as cabs are sneaky competitors to gig workers who are as it is grappling with reduced incomes. 'We are paying taxes for running commercial vehicles, and others are turning their private cars into cabs, escaping the tax, obviously with the platform's consent! We must protest such cheap tactics by Uber to grow its business.'

'Let us spread the information about unfair and unilateral blocking of IDs. The government, company and media must take this challenge head on to come up with a solution for this,' writes a worker after sharing the circumstances in which his ID was blocked. A while later, a Google form is shared where workers have to write why their ID was blocked, '. . . so that the decision-makers in the government know what we are dealing with....'

Kutumb is a private social network for communities that is built for Indians to share their views in their own language and connect with their community. Among the numerous worker communities using the app, such as farmers, and poultry farmers, are gig workers. Leaders repeatedly urge workers to download the app to bolster their numbers to 'claim our social and economic rights'....

The way workers are using technology to rally against the tech platforms is similar to a Cherokee story about a native Indian called Sequoyah and his creation of a Cherokee syllabary. Sequoyah was a Cherokee silversmith, trader and man of many talents who lived in the early nineteenth century. In 1813-14, while serving as a warrior of the Cherokee Regiment against a renegade group, Sequoyah witnessed the advantage the white colonists enjoyed because they had an established written language. Unlike the white soldiers, he and his fellow Cherokee warriors could not write letters home, read their military orders or record any thoughts that occurred to them while serving on the waterfront. They had to rely solely on memory in the absence of a script. Sequoyah was determined to create some form of written language for the Cherokees. Despite being illiterate in English, he dedicated years to developing a writing system for the Cherokee language inspired by English, Greek and Hebrew letters. The Cherokees thus adapted and repurposed writing technology to serve their own cultural and linguistic preservation, thereby ensuring the survival of their heritage for future generations.

Sometimes, it is possible to use the very tool that is being used by an authority in power to stand your ground and not get crushed.