DATACTIVE is proud to announce the publication of a new peer-reviewed article, co-authored by Stefania Milan with Annalisa Pelizza and Yoren Lausberg of the “sister” project Processing Citizenship (ERC no. 714463). It is open access and can be found following this link.

by Miren Gutiérrez & Marina Landa (Universidad de Deusto)

What is the relevance of open data for ordinary people? Despite the terrible loss of life and increased social divides, COVID-19 has been an opportunity to explore the role of data in people’s lives at the local level here, in Euskadi (Basque Country in Basque).

To do that, Marina and I relied on participant observation of a three-day workshop, interviews with fifteen experts and open data reusers, and an analysis of 78 citizen projects that employ open data submitted to the Open Data Euskadi awards (an open competition) in 2015, 2018, and 2020. Data collection was conducted before the first wave and after the third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, from November 27, 2019, to February 17, 2021, allowing us to make comparisons.

The questions we were asking were: “What do minders, reusers of, and experts on open data say about how open data should be?” “What does an analysis of 78 cases of re-utilization of open data from the Basque facility say about open data?” And “are there any disparities between what the data collected say before and after the COVID-19 pandemic struck Euskadi?” We look at each of these questions from the perspective of the transparency-participation-collaboration paradigm for open government.

The two main results were somehow surprising. Basically, people expect, want, and use open data more than the custodians of open data vaults expect or plan for. And although the pandemic has seen an increased interest in data and data visualizations, this interest preceded COVID-19.

We find that citizens are pushing for what we have called actionable open data, or data embedding the attributes that make them useful and usable. This includes integrating data literacy and citizens’ inputs and forming interdisciplinaryteams of people inside and outside the government.

The level of open data re-utilization, ten years after the launch of the Basque Government’s open data platform, was low when the pandemic struck. Unexpectedly, many people were captivated by Open Data Euskadi, and its daily data updates were the center of public debate. The discrepancies found in the datasets offered by the Spanish state’s Ministry of Health and Osakidetza –the independent Basque health system— resulted in heated debates on social media platforms.

Suddenly, infographics and charts were lingua franca; the collective motto during the confinement has been “let’s flatten the curve.” People were demanding more and better open data and publishing their own curves. In June, dozens of ordinary people and experts signed a manifesto in favor of “accessible public data for the construction of shared knowledge in times of the global pandemic.” The declaration argued that scientists, journalists, and citizens could help decision-makers if disaggregated data were accessible “in a structured, open, clearly linked, and a contextualized way.”

Except for some authors in critical data and urban studies, scholarship’s emphasis so far has been on top-down approaches to datafication. Most efforts to further the idea of open data participation and collaboration “are driven by traditional top-down administrative commands or directives practically without any input from members of the civil society,” says for example Kassen. Instead, we took a bottom-up approach to explore the role of open data in the lives of people.

Some of the exciting ideas emerging from this analysis include:

• The analysis reveals tensions between a) the real conditions in which open data supporters within the administration work and the expectations and needs generated by the pandemic; b) the perceptions of a lack of curiosity on the part of citizens and the real interest exposed by the projects submitted to the Open Data awards; and c) the data literacy of people and the challenges of data agency.
• Open data enthusiasts in the administration complain about lack of a) support, knowledge, or interest from politicians making decisions at the top; b) cooperation from other departments that oversee data collection; c) standardized systems; and d) mechanisms to integrate citizens’ inputs.
• Data openers are not users, and discrepancies about what data are needed may emerge. “We do liberate open data in massive amounts, but we need civic knowledge to open what is needed,” said a civil servant.
• Our analysis of the submissions to the Open Data awards supports the notion that citizens do not find everything they need in the open data vaults: only 15 of the 78 initiatives examined (19.2 percent) rely just on Open Data Euskadi’s datasets. And 28 of the 78 projects (35.9 percent) propose, explicitly or implicitly, that Open Data Euskadi offer new datasets to develop their idea.
• Pandemic open data were offered in a non-systematic manner initially, and that it took some time before the Open Data Euskadi updates became regular. But some problems continued: the same information was not always available, the criteria were changed, and some of the data offered as authenticated previously were later modified, making comparisons impossible. Data journalists and activists –feeding maps and search engines with hospital occupation, nursing homes, and intensive care unit data in quasi real-time— had to make “continuous adjustments to the datasets” and even remove entire charts because a data type was no longer supplied. But the data visualization section was a favorite with their publics, “so we understand that it has helped people, or at least offered a better understanding of the pandemic.”
• The perception that there is “more participation offers than (citizen) demand” is misplaced. 61 of the 78 initiatives were submitted by individuals, most of them with social purposes and not by for-profits or institutions for commercial purposes.
• Not all the projects presented in 2020 were related to the pandemic. Only ten of the 33 ideas were explicitly proposed to address the situation provoked by COVID-19, and another two mentioned the pandemic as a non-essential variable.

 

Do not miss Gutierrez, M. and Landa, M. 2021. “From Available to Actionable Data: An Exploration of Expert and Reuser Views on Open Data.” Journal of Urban Technology (accepted on May 27, 2021).

What’s the current state of India’s gig economy? This article explores the precariousness of gig work and the surveillance practices introduced during the pandemic, and details the newly introduced Social Security Code which covers platform workers.

by Titiksha Vashist & Shyam Krishnakumar

 

The COVID-19 pandemic has accentuated the rise of the platform economy, impacting both white and blue-collar workers in India. In the wake of the pandemic, workers were left without an income, social security, or safety nets in urban cities. Owing to this, India saw reverse migration from cities to rural villages and towns. Further, the pandemic has introduced and normalized new technological practices that have increased worker surveillance including body temperature surveillance, movement tracking, and deployment of automated facial recognition technology at work. These have added fresh concerns of privacy and agency to the previously existing structural issues.

The State of India’s Gig Economy

The gig economy is a crucial part of India’s ongoing digital transformation with consequences for the future of work and the platform economy. Gigs are temporary or short-term jobs hosted on digital platforms that connect employers and service providers. According to some estimates, India currently has 3 million gig workers. With growing cab aggregator apps like Uber and Ola, food delivery platforms like Swiggy and Zomato and home-service providers like Urban Company, India’s gig economy is projected to employ 6 million Indians by 2021. According to a report by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India, India’s gig economy will be worth $455 billion by 2022, making it one of the fastest-growing segments of the economy with an expected growth rate of 17% per annum. This estimate might have to be revised upwards in the post-pandemic period given the increased demand for e-commerce and digital services. However, unlike its western counterparts, gig work is not unknown in India. About 81% of India’s workers are engaged in the informal sector which is responsible for almost 50% of India’s GDP. It is common for unskilled and semi-skilled laborers in India to work contractually, for multiple employers over short-spans without any formal protection or security benefits.

White-collar platform gig work

For white-collar workers, the remote work regime of the pandemic reduced employer skepticism regarding the dependability of temporary employees and created new opportunities for freelancers. As the nature of work became remote, service-providers could now offer to work with greater flexibility for companies without tying themselves to one employer. The government and workers both see digital platforms as new avenues of job creation in India. As the economy slowed down during the pandemic and jobs became scarce, an estimated 56% of new employment was generated by gig platforms. According to the Economic Survey released in 2021, India has become one of the biggest flexi-markets owing to the increased dependence on e-commerce platforms. As online retail businesses grew, so did the cut in full-time employees, and increased hiring of freelancers to decrease overheads.

The precarity of blue-collar gig work

On the job no more

Now let us turn our attention to blue-collar gig work. With the onset of the lockdown, food delivery platforms Swiggy and Zomato fired approximately 2000 workers. Cab hailing platforms Ola and Uber let go of over 3000 workers. This accounted for 13%–25% of these platforms’ total workforce. Given these instances, it is difficult to estimate the benefits which digital platforms bring to the workforce in India. While Swiggy provided workers with 2-3 months of salary and promised career support, these benefits were not standard or assured and the job loss hit workers dearly. Owing to these costs at the time of the pandemic, several gig workers migrated back to their villages or townships given the lack of opportunity and security in urban cities. The on-demand nature of gig work makes it highly insecure. A 2020 report on worker conditions by Fair Work India evaluated 11 digital platforms in India across fair pay, fair conditions, fair contracts, management, and representation. Zomato, Swiggy, and Uber were rated worst on every parameter scoring a 1 on a scale of 10, while Amazon, grocery app BigBasket, home construction and renovation company Housejoy, and Ola scored 2 each.

The platform-driven economy poses key challenges to workers’ rights. Platforms are often designed to take away the bargaining power of workers using asymmetry of information, denial of market access, and partial benefits of technology. Studies show that contracts are often unfair and power imbalances favor the platform. Lack of working with a single organization means workers cannot demand better working conditions, unionize or file lawsuits, owing to their legal status being disadvantageous.

Who paid for that? Operating costs

Platform workers in India are predominantly paid a piece rate (per task), and are typically classified by the platforms as ‘independent contractors’, drivers or delivery ‘partners’. This hides the precariousness of gig work and the power asymmetry under the veneer of ‘entrepreneurship’. One major concern with a per-task pay is that workers do not benefit from labor regulations in India. During the pandemic, digital platforms were able to shift much of the operating cost onto workers. Drivers paid for fuel, auto insurance, and maintenance of vehicles. In the case of food delivery workers, the costs of personal protective gear and sanitary products were shifted onto the customer placing orders, with a lack of clarity on its distribution. In several cases, food delivery workers themselves paid for PPEs and hygiene products without adequate reimbursement.

Worker surveillance technologies and the New Normal

The COVID-19 pandemic has not only exacerbated precarity in gig work but also created new concerns regarding technological tools deployed for monitoring, automated contact tracing, and other solutions created to aid state efforts to fight COVID. New forms of worker surveillance such as temperature reading, heart-rate, and oxygen saturation monitoring, and the use of thermal imaging cameras in the workplace are fast-becoming the new normal. These include biometric surveillance that reduces worker agency and consent, particularly reducing the ability to opt-out.  Collecting and publicly displaying body temperatures of chefs and delivery persons has become a routine practice for food-delivery platforms like Swiggy and Zomato.

Government agencies too are increasingly adopting wearable tech to track movement and time-worked (like Punjab’s sanitation workers) for public employees. In some cases, workers were reportedly made to pay to buy mandatory surveillance gear, and pay to maintain the monitoring equipment.

Such a tech-solutionist approach to battling the pandemic leads to a plethora of social and legal concerns including misidentification, collection of sensitive personal health data, violation of privacy and increased surveillance. These issues need more attention given the absence of an enforceable personal data protection law and clear redressal mechanisms in India.

India’s Social Security Code and the need for fresh policy

In 2020, India passed an updated version of the Social Security Code. The Bill mandated both the central and state governments to create a social security fund for unorganized workers, gig workers, and platform workers. Workers will also be protected by minimum wages, and women must be allowed to work in all categories with adequate protection requirements in place.

The bill clarifies that a security scheme for gig and platform workers will be funded through a mix of contributions from the central government, state governments, and aggregators themselves. Nine categories of aggregators have been created under the Bill and the government will soon announce the rate of contribution by each aggregator. This could range between 1-2% of their annual turnover. Finally, such contributions cannot exceed 5% of the amount payable by an aggregator to gig workers.

Moreover, the National Social Security Board will now be responsible for the welfare of gig workers to recommend and monitor schemes. The Board will include five representatives of aggregators, five representatives of gig workers and platform workers, the Director General of the Employees’ State Insurance Company, and five representatives of state governments.

While this is a positive step, the lack of state capacity, poor execution of social security and absence of a minimum wage in the Indian market creates complications. Moreover, capping the percentage of contribution by large multinationals makes the regulator appear to be too soft on these digital platforms. India still has a long way to go to organize and give adequate protection to its workers, especially in face of surveillance technologies, the precariousness of work, and the new normal created by the pandemic. It needs a comprehensive, multifaceted approach to regulate platforms given the rapid growth of the gig economy.

 

About the authors

Titiksha Vashist is a researcher working on the socio-political implications of technology in India. She writes on how the digital transformation is impacting Indian society and politics, with a focus on policy for technology. She holds a Masters in Political Science and International Relations from Jawaharlal Nehru University.

Shyam Krishnakumar is a technology policy consultant and researcher whose work engages with emerging technology in the Indian context. Prior to this, he co-founded EduSeva, an ed-tech startup focussed on providing world class-education at the grassroots. Shyam is a Computer Science graduate and holds a Masters in Political Science with a specialisation in International Affairs. He runs the InTech Dispatch, a fortnightly on emerging tech and society in India.

 

 

We are very happy to host for the first time a podcast in our series ‘COVID-19 from the Margins’/BigDataSur.

The world we want is a 30′ podcast created by three students at the University of Amsterdam in the framework of the course Digital Activism taught by Lonneke van der Velden, Maxigas and Stefania Milan. In this podcast, Gavin, Lucínia and Veerle discuss ‘other’ epistemologies and in particular the indigenous social philosophy of Buen Vivir (“good living”). The podcast discusses how and what Western democracies can learn from the ‘global South’ in terms of de-westernisation, the environment, and COVID-19. Furthermore, this podcast looks at the relationship between big data, media and the South.

Listen to or download the podcast.

 

About the authors

Gavin Ashcroft-Dinnning is an MA Film Studies student at the University of Amsterdam with an interest in Queer Theory and French Cinema. His work is focused on queer temporality and queer world-building in fashion films.

Lucínia Philip is an MA Film Studies student at the University of Amsterdam with an interest in South Korean cinema and pop culture. Her work involves the discussion and representation of (post-)colonialism, gender and sexuality in South Korean cinema.

Veerle Gieling is an MA Television and Cross-Media Culture student at the University of Amsterdam with an interest in representation studies. Her work involves intersectional representation research and a master thesis on the representation of Down Syndrome in Dutch media.