Abstract
Digital mobility platforms have emerged as essential parts of urban mobility landscapes, thereby contesting established forms of intermediate public transportation (IPT), such as (shared) taxis and rickshaws. Taxi services and the associated labour are often described as ‘informal’ both in academic literature and policy debates. With the entry of mobility platforms into South Asia’s urban service economy, there is renewed scholarly interest in exploring the nature of informality and the formal/informal dichotomy.This contribution employs a spatial and temporal conceptualization of informality to understand the contentious ways that labour and transport are (in)formalized by the state, and how access to urban space and resources is negotiated. I analyse the politics of digital mobility platforms for the case of Mumbai/India using Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space. The taxi sector is regarded here as a social space that is produced by different forms of taxi driving, including metered taxis that are long established in Mumbai. The aim is to explore how ideas of formality and informality shape conceptualizations of the taxi sector, and how such conceptualizations interact and collide with the experiences and practices of everyday taxi driving.I conclude that platform firms deploy different conceptualizations of taxi driving that cater to different target groups, generating an appearance of formality for their business and operation models. At the same time, their practices of driver engagement are highly informal, creating power asymmetries between drivers and the platform firms. I also observe that the platforms’ operational models and algorithms are constantly evolving towards including aspects of the lived realities of drivers, to be able to respond to failures and ‘driver misbehaviour’.
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Notes
- 1.
Also called cab aggregators, transit network companies, ride hailing or ridesharing companies
- 2.
- 3.
Although a shift in employment to the service sector occurred, manufacturing activity has not completely disappeared in Mumbai, but has become informal and invisible within in the city limits or has dispersed away from the city centre to locations in the Mumbai region (Harris, 2012; Finkelstein, 2015).
- 4.
Street vendors, for example, may apply for formal licenses and become part of unions to secure access to vending space and other resources, and simultaneously pay fees to local gangs or hafta to placate the authorities.
- 5.
E.g. Turner and Hạnh highlight how motorbike taxi drivers in Hanoi, when interacting with the police ‘leverage their personal identity as elderly, poor or war veterans to pay the lowest fines possible,’ concluding that drivers are ‘quick to draw on such resources to maintain their rhythms while reducing frictions’ (Turner & Hạnh, 2019: 58).
- 6.
According to some of these fleet owners, by the time of completing the research in early 2020, there were only a handful of large fleet owners (with more than 50 vehicles) in Mumbai providing cars and drivers to one of the large competitors operating in the city.
- 7.
Taxi permits for metered taxis are issued under the Motor Vehicles Act 1988. These taxi permits are limited in their number, demand the use of CNG as fuel and require the installation of digital taximeters. For taxis in Maharashtra, further regulations limit the circle of potential drivers, as they need proof of domicile in Maharashtra and a working knowledge of Marathi in order to obtain a public service vehicle (PSV) badge that is required to operate a taxi. The fare system of metered taxis is fixed and the proper installation of meters is regularly checked by the authorities. Metered taxi stands need approval by road transport authorities and the number of taxis allowed to ply is limited. Finally, the speed of taxis and other commercial vehicles is automatically controlled by on-board units. Mumbai Traffic Police is known for strict imposition of traffic rules.
- 8.
In addition, more than 200.000 licensed auto rickshaws operate in the city.
- 9.
- 10.
Interestingly, consultancies also celebrate romanticized narratives of informality when it comes to highlighting the potential for the creativity of entrepreneurship, as McKinsey did in its Vision Mumbai report: ‘The taxi driver: You don’t need GPS with shim around. He knows every nook and cranny of the city’ (Bombay First and McKinsey, 2003; as cited in Ong, 2011: 85; and McFarlane, 2012: 2803).
- 11.
Common criticisms include a lack of courtesy, ride refusal, and refusal to ply by the meter, among others.
- 12.
The state-commissioned committee in charge of revising the fare structure of taxis and rickshaws in the state, reproduces the narratives about unruly metered taxi drivers and asserts an overall improvement of commuter experience due to the entry of app-based taxis. Among kaali peeli drivers, it observes a ‘growing awareness among them about the need for consumer-orientation, better upkeep of their vehicles, and playing by the rules’ (Khatua et al., 2017:ii). The state itself—while putting restrictions on mobility platforms—has emphasized the need for ‘retaining the advantages of efficient demand/supply matching, dynamic price discovery and better commuter experience and up-gradation/modernization of taxi services’ in the notification for the City Taxi Rules, 2017 (Home Department, Government of Maharasthra, 2017).
- 13.
Similar to other states—including Karnataka, Haryana, Gujarat, and the NCT of Delhi—the new regulations foresee that drivers may not continue operating on Tourist permits, but must obtain a contract carriage permit under section 74 of the MV Act 1988, or, as in the case of Maharashtra, they shall convert their Tourist permits into an ‘App Based City Taxi Permit,’ a permit type specifically created for the purpose of the new policy (CSTEP, 2020). Other states have abstained from imposing such strict permit requirements; e.g. in Kolkata—the second city in India where historically a significant number of metered taxis has been operating—platform-attached cabs are allowed to continue to operate on Tourist permits (Government of West Bengal, Transport Department, 2015).
- 14.
Thereby Uber supported an earlier petition by six drivers against the ‘arbitrary restrictions’ of the Rules, arguing that the permits under the new rules would cost them 10 times more than what it would cost drivers of black and yellow taxis (Press Trust of India, 2017b). Three hundred drivers also approached the BJP state leadership including the then chief minister asking them to oppose the new laws, citing low CNG supply in the state as one of the reasons (Ahmed, 2017).
- 15.
In its ruling over Uber’s petition, the court compared Maharashtra to western cities to position the state as a showcase for liberal regulation: ‘In London and America, there are regular cabs and Uber cabs plying on the same fares. Maharashtra should also do something like that and be a trend-setter for other states in India’ (Press Trust of India, 2017a).
- 16.
When new rickshaw permits were issued in 2016, aspirant drivers were required to undergo a verbal Marathi test. This provision was challenged by several petitions in court, followed by a trial of strength between different benches of the High Court, judging over the Marathi rule four times in 2016/17, variously confirming the Marathi rule by terming it ‘reasonable’ or rejecting it as ‘completely illegal’ (Sequeira, 2016, 2017). Again, in 2019 the Bombay High Court ruled in favour of the Marathi language rule (Benwal, 2019), a decision that was also confirmed by the recommendations of the Khatua Report. Additionally, the state government upheld the 15-year domicile rule for the proposed, but not yet enforced, City Taxi Rules in early 2020, against the recommendation of the Khatua Committee (Sen & Jain, 2020b).
- 17.
After the High Court ruling of 2017, the state government declared that it would not take coercive steps against the platforms and drivers for the moment, and the final court’s decision was postponed. The issue of new Tourist permits to Ola and Uber drivers was temporarily stalled in 2019 (Sen, 2019). In 2020, the Government of Maharashtra stated again that it would not take any steps until the court took a final decision in the case of the petitions filed by Uber and several drivers in 2017 (Swati Deshpande, 2020).
- 18.
A parallel process concerning the revision of fare structures for both metered and app-based cabs was initiated in 2016, when the state government formed the Khatua Committee with a brief to revise the fare structure of metered and app-based taxis. The Committee submitted the report in 2017; however, it was only after the new state government came into power that a decision on the recommendations given by the committee was taken in March 2020 (Sen & Jain, 2020a; Press Trust of India, 2021).
- 19.
It is important to note here, however, that the responsible authorities delivered a different interpretation of their intervention. Reportedly they wanted to put pressure on platform firms, but did not have the jurisdiction to take action against them. An official was cited as saying: ‘We don’t want to target drivers as the issue is much larger. However, we feel these drivers should create some pressure on the companies’ (Mahale, 2019).
- 20.
This was the case when mobility platforms were banned temporarily in 2014 in Delhi. In another case, drivers without commercial driving licenses were fined by the police in Bengaluru in 2018, although the federal government had previously legalized operations of commercial vehicles with standard driving licenses (Prasad, 2018). Again in Karnataka, drivers suffered a couple of anxious days when the state government withdrew the license of a large platform firm for six months, but lifted the ban a week later (Menezes & Peermohamed, 2019).
- 21.
Indeed, that the concerns were taken seriously is clearly perceivable in the report of the Khatua Committee, and this was also the impression of the author while interviewing Mr. Khatua personally, as well as other representatives of the responsible state authorities.
- 22.
This was the situation until November 2020, when the Central Government of India set a new rule that drivers of app-based taxis could not operate on continuous shifts for more than 12 hours (Nandi, 2020). Many drivers kindly showed me their driving statistics in the app.
- 23.
For owners of cars, leaving the occupation usually requires selling the car that is often not paid off yet, and dealing with remaining loan obligations. The roles of the burgeoning second-hand car market as well as the loan system for sustaining the volatile and contested workings of mobility platforms are beyond the scope of this chapter.
- 24.
In September 2019, the Indian Federation of App-based Transport Workers was formed in Mumbai.
- 25.
‘Sir’ or ‘Master’ in Hindi and Urdu
- 26.
In one such messenger group a driver showed to me, guests of a hotel in a popular weekend destination in the vicinity of Mumbai—where platform operations had been banned in 2017—were connected to platform drivers from Mumbai by a hotel employee for full day-round trips.
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The author would like to thank his research participants and field assistants in Mumbai. He is also grateful to the volume’s editors, Aditi Surie, and Ursula Huws, for their valuable comments and feedback on earlier drafts, which helped to improve the chapter.
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Kuttler, T. (2023). (In)Formality and the Janus Face of the Platform: Production of the ‘Space of Taxi Driving’ between Everyday Realities and Rationalities of State and Market. In: Surie, A., Huws, U. (eds) Platformization and Informality . Dynamics of Virtual Work. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11462-5_4
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