Emerging Work Trends in Urban India

COVID-19 and Beyond

Nidhi Tandon, Pratyusha Basu, Omkumar Krishnan, Bhavani R.V.

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000541069
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

This book offers an overview of India's emerging digital economy and the resulting challenges and opportunities for urban workplaces. It examines contemporary economic and social transformations in India by focusing on how new technologies and policies are shaping urban work practices and patterns. The book emphasizes inclusive and equitable practices that consider the needs of the formal and informal sector workforce as essential to India's urban development. Drawing on cross-disciplinary frameworks, it examines key issues related to work trends in the Indian urban economy and its digital landscapes, including Industry 4.0 and technology–labour nexus, smart cities and innovation, urbanism and consumerism, workplace transitions such as service industry and remote work, digital divide, skill development initiatives, and the impact of socio-economic inequalities and disruptions. The authors provide perspectives on the digital future of urban work in India and other emerging economies in the post-COVID-19 phase, and underscore the importance of enacting balanced policies, remodelling institutions, and equipping the labour force for adapting to new demands related to future employability and investments.

This book will interest students, teachers, and researchers of urban studies, urban sociology, sociology of work, labour studies, human and urban geography, economic geography, urban economics, development studies, urban development and planning, public policy, regional planning, politics of urban development, social and cultural change, urban sustainability, environmental studies, management studies, South Asian Studies, and Global South studies. It will also be useful to policymakers, non-governmental organizations, activists, and those interested in India and the future of the global economy.

1 INTRODUCTION

DOI: 10.4324/9781003264194-1

The world today is on the threshold of the Fourth Industrial Revolution with work processes and spaces being increasingly configured for automation and robotics. A popular way to refer to urban configurations that have paved the way for this transformation is Silicon Valley, referring both to places where digital work has emerged and prospered, and prominent centres in wider global networks of information technology-led economic growth. The original Silicon Valley in the U.S. – located in northern California’s Santa Clara Valley and stretching from San Francisco to San Jose – became the hub of technological innovation and entrepreneurship in high-tech electronics and semiconductor industries through start-ups, supportive government regulations, ancillary support services, and the presence of a premier educational institute feeding the industry with a specialized workforce. Silicon Valley enterprises recruited a highly skilled and adaptive workforce, partly comprising young immigrants from the developing world (Hyde, 2003). Union presence was largely absent from the industry possibly because most labour unions did not see any value in organizing immigrants, due to both the low wages paid to workers and racial bias. The lack of unions set the stage for future automated and contract manufacturing, offshoring operations, and today’s fissured workplace and contingent workers, all of which were instrumental in the outflow of entrepreneurial energies from Silicon Valley to the rest of the world.

This was especially the case with immigrants from India who preferred the pleasant climate of Bengaluru in South India, a city for retired professionals, for their technology start-ups. In Saxenian’s (2006, 2012) accounts, these information technology workers were the “New Argonauts”, after the heroic band at the centre of a Greek myth, who utilized the skills they brought to the Silicon Valley to also build technology companies in their countries of origin. But connections to the U.S. were not the only factor that enabled the rise of Bengaluru as a world-class knowledge economy hub. The circumstances under which the city grew as an information technology centre¹ can be traced back to the establishment of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in 1909, a vision of industrialist and philanthropist J.N. Tata in collaboration with Sir William Ramsay, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1904, and the Nizam of Hyderabad, ruler of an erstwhile princely state in India. As a premier educational institute, the IISc made major contributions to enhancing access to scientific expertise and technical skills in India. Bengaluru’s value as the “science capital” of India is also exemplified by the establishment of various centres associated with the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and the Defence Research and Development Organization (DRDO). Equally significant was the role of the skills and peer networks provided by the first five Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). Bengaluru’s most competitive assets are a robust supply of expertise and skills – in Glaeser’s (2011, p. 8) words, Bengaluru’s “wealth comes not from industrial might… but from its strength as a city of ideas”. The plethora of new employment opportunities has also made Bengaluru a sought-after destination for India’s growing middle class. Prominent technology companies have taken advantage of this existing ecosystem to become leaders in back-office support, from solving Y2K problems to providing end-to-end solutions, and the city has become the leading outsourcing destination for low-cost software and support services.

Not too far away from India, the rise of Shenzen – which can be considered the Silicon Valley of China – is yet another remarkable tale of technology-led urban growth (UN-Habitat, 2019). From its humble beginnings in the 1980s as the site of a small fishing village, repair workshops, farm machinery maintenance, and small-scale cotton mills, Shenzen made the transition to microchips, iPhones, aerial technology, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) by attracting foreign direct investment and skilled labour, partly taking advantage of its proximity to Hong Kong. The delineation of a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) which sought to serve the interests of foreign capital was one strategy that enabled this transition. The rise of Huawei as a leading information and communication technology company can partly be linked to the ability of the Chinese government to include private capital interests within a state-regulated economy. Labour force characteristics mirrored the changing nature of work in the city. In 1990, about 65 per cent of the total labour force had high school education or less in keeping with the preponderance of labour-intensive manufacturing enterprises, and a large proportion of this labour force consisted of migrants from across East and Southeast Asia. Between 1992 and 2003, Shenzen experienced an explosive growth in high-tech industrial parks and transitioned to capital- and technology-intensive advanced manufacturing; the proportion of college educated workers increased significantly during this period. More recently, to retain competitive advantage over Southeast Asian economies and counter adverse geopolitical configurations led by the U.S., the Chinese government has encouraged investments in local research and innovation utilizing spillover knowledge and technologies. This has fostered the “Shenzen effect” – a culture of innovation-driven high-tech economic growth. Contrary to the general assumption that anything “Made in China” originates from Shenzen through mass-produced cheap rip-offs, the manufacturing philosophy that has emerged here is a rapid, flexible, and open-sourced ecosystem called shanzhai (Mina and Chipchase, 2018). Alongside, Shenzen has continued to invest heavily in urban infrastructure through extensive land reclamation to align with future government plans to establish a “pioneering demonstration zone of socialism with Chinese characteristics”. The rise of the digital Yuan (Dychtwald, 2021) and the country’s focus on prioritizing “a higher level of self-reliance” with the announcement of the China Standards 2035 (Kharpal, 2020) is a further attempt by China to consolidate its global position.

Silicon Valley cities are thus one part of a competitive and flexible economic system where growth emerges from both local energies and global synergies. In the rise of the Santa Clara valley, Bengaluru, and Shenzen as highly productive clusters of innovation-based technology hubs, each had their own unique set of local economic and institutional environments even as all of them also drew on workers from wider national and global contexts. However, this narrative of how digital growth arises within particular urban configurations also raises broader questions. To begin with, has Silicon Valley become the de facto model for urbanization in the digital economy? At issue is not just the investment required to build physical and social infrastructures for information technology workplaces and lifestyles, but also the need for coordination across various governmental, corporate, and educational entities. More critically, what enables the “silicon” veneer of the city and what hides below its surface? Within Silicon Valley cities, economic and social exclusions are produced through astronomical increases in the price of real estate and lack of municipal support for low-income and low-skilled workers (Sheyner, 2020; Wipf, 2021). The digital economy therefore needs to be situated within a broader social and political economy and the multiple experiences of work associated with it.

The aim of this book² is to examine how the future of urban work in India will be shaped by the increasing adoption of new digital technologies and integration of cyber-physical systems. In the process, the main argument is that while increasing digitalization is possibly inevitable, the infrastructural and socio-economic characteristics of this digitalization will be shaped by local contexts as much as by global models. Thus, a delving into present experiences reveals not just possible futures of work in India, but also raises questions as to whether this future will be led by governance policies that seek to serve society as a whole, or state-supported financial speculation that approaches the digital as the latest realm for economic accumulation within a wider neoliberal hegemony.

In the case of India, the shift to a digital economy has been accompanied by two main kinds of debates – one associated with the skills needed for digital work, and the other related to how existing economic and social inequalities will shape ongoing technological shifts. Currently, these debates also intersect with COVID-19 (MoF, 2021), which has spurred the adoption of digital technologies, revealed inequalities in access to healthcare within national economic realms, and underlined limitations of existing global mechanisms for collaboration. First, whether and how existing forms of work can be transitioned into the digital realm remains a matter of concern. Thus, even as digital work increases flexibility in terms of location and hours, it could also increase insecurities in access to work due to the rise of platform and gig economies, and increasing use of contract and contingent labour. Second, the ongoing pandemic has signalled the dangers embedded in an economically unequal world, including dangers to the global economy and its principal drivers, such as the U.S. and China. Within India, the pandemic has revealed the fragility of an informal urban economy while largely enabling the digitally connected upper and middle classes to continue with business-as-usual. The current pandemic by highlighting the presence of vulnerabilities in the social fabric thus also raises questions about the economic consequences of digital futures.

There are three main ways in which this book seeks to contribute to existing conceptual and empirical approaches to the future of work in the digital economy, and these can be organized around the themes of infrastructure, identity, and governance. First, this book connects to studies that view the digital economy as a sociotechnical assemblage (Winter et al., 2014; Müller, 2015; Jarrahi and Sawyer, 2019), so that new digital technologies both shape and are shaped by the social context within which they have to be embedded. Urban geographies are more than corporate and residential real estate; they are also sites where human–machine interactions are enabled. These interactions reflect relations of power and resistance as the urban economy transforms through encounters between capitalist imperatives, governmental arrangements, everyday human subjects, and new digital technologies. Remaining attentive to the urban as sociotechnical assemblage also reveals that while technological infrastructure emerges from human imaginations, it may produce social complexities that are not always clear in its moment of emergence.

A second contribution of this book is the consideration of how various social identities will shape and be reshaped by digital work. Existing economic and sociological studies of class formations in India have provided insights into the experiences of an industrial working class which has witnessed the transformation from protectionist to free trade policies (Nathan, 1987; Breman, 2004; Bhowmik, 2006; Bhal, 1995; Parry, 2020), the rise of a new urban middle class linked to the service economy (Fernandes, 2006; Brosius, 2010; Dickey, 2012), and the transition of rural classes to often informal urban work (Agarwala, 2009; Breman, 2012; Aslany, 2020). New forms of work in the digital economy will possibly continue to augment the global orientation of elite and middle classes while making a mass of low-income workers available for serving the interests of global capital. Conversely, it could also produce new entrepreneurial opportunities, and make place for new forms of learning and living. This book examines the service sector, consumerism, manufacturing employment, and informal work to provide deeper insights into aspects of the economy that will be affected by digital futures. In the process, it explores how digital work can become the basis for new studies of identity in the Indian socio-economic context (Hirsch-Kreinsen, 2016).

A final contribution of this book is the comparisons India may evoke with other emerging economies and lessons it may provide for other economies making the transition to digital work. India and China are often contrasted in terms of their role in the global economy (Nigam, 2017) and the digital transformation of India is thus poised between competitive pressures with China and collaborative inclinations with the U.S. The notion of “extended urbanization” (Brenner, 2013 a, pp. 102–104), often encapsulated under planetary urbanization (Brenner and Schmid, 2012) and whose resonances can be found in studies of urban policy mobility (McCann, 2011), underscores the shaping of the urban economy by global resource and knowledge flows. This book endeavours to examine how the future of work in India is congruent with transformations occurring across the world, even as this future also has aspects unique to India’s specific historical trajectory and social contexts. Indian cities contend with problems of poor physical infrastructure, traffic congestion, pollution, and lack of municipal services, but their aspirations remain connected to globally inflected consumption trends, including leisure spaces and activities that can display the affluence of digitally connected classes. India’s urban digital economy is therefore an ideal context in which to trace how global flows of urban policies are mediated by local needs.

Urbanization in India: a longer history

Before delving into the future of the digital economy in India, it is useful to rehearse the longer history of urbanization that has led to and is likely to remain visible within this future (Spodek, 1980). One way to view this history is to compare how urbanization was shaped during colonial, post-independence, and neoliberal eras, and how these constructions continue to remain useful ways to understand key features of economic and social development in India. Table 1.1 provides an overview of the trajectory of urbanization and evolution of work trends in India. From the rise of frontier towns along the ancient “Silk Route” to British colonialism, India’s urbanization has reflected its linkages to a wider world. However, in a world that is increasingly urbanized, contemporary India is still predominantly rural and this can partly be linked to a skewed accumulation of capital in its megacities during the colonial period. The present-day regional hierarchies of Indian cities thus partly reflect the colonial privileging of port cities even as the remarkable rise of non-coastal metropolises, B...