In this book , we begin to interrogate the phenomenon of India’s expanding platform economy in terms of both rationale and process, linking a series of empirical inquiries to a critical analysis of the prevailing logics of ‘platform capitalism’ and ‘platformization’. This approach reflects our view that platforms are market systems rather than simply technical systems and explores the consequent need to situate their evolution in India both contextually and historically. In this respect, we diverge from an understanding of platforms as novel forms of firm emerging unheralded from the affordances of data mining and mobile technologies. In developing a markets-based approach towards the platform economy, we attempt to outline the key motivating tendencies playing out across the interlocking domains of commerce, technology, sociability and logistics. In doing so, this collection of chapters seeks to establish a set of analytical markers more precisely attuned to the cultural dynamics and path dependencies shaping digital marketplaces in India. In undertaking this task, the contributors to this volume offer a range of perspectives, articulated across different disciplines and different sites of the platform economy. Collectively, we situate ‘platform capitalism’ as a phenomenon emerging from the extension and convergence of long-term tendencies in media markets, state policy and the central pursuit of a technocratic solution to India’s development goals, paying attention to the widespread and multitudinous issues arising from those endeavours. Critically, each of the authors argues in their own way for a substantially sui generis approach to understanding platform capitalism in India.
Successive governments over the past two decades have staked a significant stock of their political capital on the ‘global positioning’ of India as a digital power (Thomas 2012). Since 2015, the Government of India has made strenuous efforts to facilitate the infrastructure necessary for realizing the vision of the ‘Digital India’ programme, with universal access to online services and a fully integrated data infrastructure. The high rhetoric of ‘Digital India’ is founded upon the biometric architecture of the Aadhaar platform, the world’s largest and most ambitious ‘mechanism of legibility’ (Cohen 2017). Riding over the country’s vast telecom and other digital networks, Aadhaar underpins the further policy ambitions of the ‘India Stack’ and the realization of a transactional economy (Aiyar 2017; India Stack 2020). Joining the international race to harness ‘smart’ technologies for sustainable cities and renewing economic growth via the ‘fourth industrial revolution’, the incumbent government has assiduously courted Silicon Valley giants on securing technology transfers, while forging systemic partnerships with domestic conglomerates to provide the necessary investments in fibre networks and data centres (see Thomas 2019). The present era of Digital India, then, is quite different in temper from the heyday of liberalization between 1991 and 2008. As the key interest in incubating the platform economy, the state functions as an orchestrator and an instrument in shaping market norms, while also being a seller of bandwidth and a procurer of infrastructural development (see Parthasarathi and Athique 2020). This ethos reflects international trends in the emerging formulation of post-globalization politics and a digital economy increasingly dominated by national champions closely linked to state sponsorship and backed by accommodating policies intended to harness the benefits of automation, digitization and various avatars of artificial intelligence.
Of itself, the $17 billion Digital India programme has become feasible only because the mobile telecoms boom in the 2000s brought major business houses into a commanding position in the overall economy of media and communications. The entry of Reliance Industries Limited (India’s largest diversified industrial conglomerate) into the mobile data sector in 2016, via its Reliance Jio subsidiary, has accelerated consolidation in mobile telecoms to the point where only three operators remain (Hill and Athique 2018; Curwen 2018). For their part, the global tech giants have proved receptive to the wider ambitions of Digital India, precisely because its core initiatives are intended to deliver the necessary ecosystem for a vast platform economy centred upon digital goods and services. Failed efforts by Facebook in 2016 to set up proprietary systems via their Free Basics initiative have not prevented India from becoming the largest user base for this platform globally (as it now is also for Facebook’s affiliate, WhatsApp). Google dominates the digital advertising market in India as a near monopoly, and the predominance of Indian music content on YouTube has led to their acquisition of legacy domestic rights holders, such as T-Series. The tussle between Amazon and Walmart for a controlling stake in India’s e-commerce markets through the latter’s purchase in 2018 of FlipKart, the largest domestic ecommerce enterprise was followed by the announcement in 2019 that India would be a test bed for Facebook’s Libra currency experiment. Since then, the tie-up announced between Reliance and Microsoft in developing a vast network of data centres reflects a common adherence to the populist mantra that ‘data is the new oil’.
At the shopfront, a host of domestic entrepreneurs have been developing digital start-ups and platform brands across a broad range of marketplaces and services. Indian platforms such as Ola, FlipKart and PayTM have attracted multiple rounds of funding, initially from ambitious ‘technology-banks’ elsewhere in Asia (such as Ali Baba, Softbank and Mediatek) and, more recently, from major US players (such as Amazon, Walmart and Microsoft). Notwithstanding competition from the global giants, India’s plentiful start-ups must also contend with the consequences of domestic conglomerates moving into content and service provision as a means of driving their own expansion in data infrastructure. This is epitomized by Reliance launching its Jio mobile network, along with Jio TV and Jio Music (Mukherjee 2019). One feature of this expanding cornucopia of platform offerings is their exuberant promotional ethos, reflected in a vast network of brand tie-ups, cross-platform cashbacks and novel forms of credit that can be accumulated and spent across the digital economy. Thus, for the verified users of Digital India, the burgeoning suite of platforms provides not only novel logistical opportunities and channels of communication, but also an expansive range of tangible and intangible commodities. These enticements rest upon various types of cross-subsidization, both between platforms and from the deeper pockets of the communication layer that supports the system. As we begin to comprehend the increasing mobility and monetization of both content and users across this interlinked ecology of platforms, we are increasingly prompted to consider the consequences of digital consolidation for the everyday transactions of commerce, culture and politics across India.
Whilst the emerging research on mobile platforms has tended to take a single firm or single product approach, there is an imperative to undertake a more holistic approach that accounts for the systemic integration intrinsic to the design and execution of the platform economy. Such an undertaking goes beyond mapping synergies and subsidies, data exchanges and algorithmic interoperability, or of the datafication and behavioural traits of...