Platform ‘glitch as surprise’: The on-demand domestic work sector in Delhi’s National Capital Region

Abstract

The emergence of on-demand domestic work sectors in cities across the world has been called the ‘Uber-isation of domestic work’. In India, the sector and its surrounding hype was short-lived as some of the country's key on-demand domestic work providers were unable to maintain sufficient profit margins and were forced to change their models or shut down altogether. This paper examines the rise and fall of the on-demand domestic work sector in urban India, drawing on 22 interviews and 2 focus groups with 32 women domestic workers across Delhi and its surrounding National Capital Region (NCR), and 2 interviews with experts in Delhi and Mumbai. Through these narratives, the paper reveals the factors which govern the failure and absence of the sector. Using Uber as a heuristic, the paper unsettles the concept of ‘Uber-isation’ as a universally applicable framework to understand platform economy activities, exposing the intersectional gender and class assumptions built into this conceptualisation. It argues that the techno-masculinist logics of on-demand domestic work platforms, which are built into the attempt to ‘Uber-ise’, have disregarded the socio-spatial relations of the city. An empirical case of what Leszczynski has called ‘glitch as surprise’, when the platform economy unexpectedly fails to manifest, this case reminds us that the city, rather than a simple site of economic practice, is socially reproduced.