Civic activism over WhatsApp and stories of and from cab drivers are part of a new narrative in Bengaluru

The article by Sowmya Rajaram was published in Bangalore Mirror on January 13, 2019.

In Silicon Plateau Vol 2, Bengaluru comes alive through the ways its inhabitants interact with, and are impacted by, mobile apps and cloud services. Published by the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, in collaboration with the Centre for Internet and Society in December 2018, this art project and publishing series explores the intersection of technology, culture and society in Bengaluru. Perusing the 16 contributions, you wonder when and how Garden City become Silicon City, and how that has changed us fundamentally.

The city has hurtled into an uncertain space – one that “offers a fertile terrain for research, having become the Silicon Valley of India and a demographically diverse metropolis in less than three decades,” as co-editors Marialaura Ghidini (art curator and researcher) and Tara Kelton (artist and designer) put it.

Unique structure

Ghidini links to Yashas Shetty’s contribution, ‘Aadhaar Cards of Great Leaders’. “One of the formal narratives behind [Aadhaar] (you can look at the latest proceedings of the Asian Development Bank conference, Financial Inclusion in the Digital Economy) is that it has facilitated access to services to whom they define as ‘a broad range of people, especially in rural areas and illiterate’, facilitating government-to-person transfer to low-income people for example. Now, many countries in the West don’t have such a stark separation between rural and urban environment,” she explains.

In her piece ‘Environmental Apptivism: WhatsApp and Digital Public Spheres in Bangalore’, Nicole Rigillo, a Canadian anthropologist who did her research as a Postdoctoral Fellow with IIMB and the University of Edinburgh, investigates how WhatsApp amplifies the civic activism of Bengaluru’s activists. While the app enables easy and fast communication and resolution, it is not always accessible to a lower socio-economic bracket. Yet, Rigillo believes that many city activists do not focus only on middle class concerns. “Many groups are concerned with the preservation of common resource goods – lakes, trees. Others advocate on behalf of the poor – Citizens for Bengaluru and others have pressuring government officials to ensure pourakarmika salaries are paid. One activist offered vegetable cart sellers bags made of stapled newspapers, and offered to provide paper and staplers to them so they could make their own. The focus was not only on protecting the environment, but also on ensuring that the cart seller was able to maintain his livelihood,” she says. Citizens use WhatsApp groups – often with government functionaries added to them – over official government apps, because it gets the job done better and faster. “And we can all recognise how this is a useful way of organising politically in Bengaluru, where the average traffic speed (17 km/hr) is the slowest of all Indian cities.” And unlike urban improvement apps across the world that “rely on one-way, black-boxed forms

of communication, placing citizens in the position of making demands of government officials”, Rigillo says Bengaluru’s proactive citizen groups are instead, actively involved in day-to-day municipal governance. “HSR Layout is a shining example here, with their citizen-led waste management protocols, community gardens, and lake revitalisation efforts, and even participating in the on-the-ground enforcement of government directives, such as Karnataka’s 2016 Plastic Ban.”

Still, questions must be asked of our involvement with apps and technology. In her piece ‘Terms of Service’, Sruthi Krishnan, writer and co-founder of Fields of View, a not-for-profit research organisation, points out how the “sanitised vocabulary of the platform economy masks and deliberately obfuscates complex, often harsh realities”. For instance, the term ‘service partner’ actually means little when the partnership is nonexistent and decisions are taken arbitrarily by the management. Ghidini agrees, because calling someone a ‘partner’ creates, as she says, “a distorted narrative around the condition of the ‘freelance’ worker, which is quite precarious, especially if your work is dictated by an algorithm that does not care if you have been driving 16 hours a day to make your daily target”.

Then, in his interview, Vir Kashyap, co-founder of Babjob.com (job platform for blue- and grey-collar job seekers, acquired by Quikr in 2017) discusses not-so-fantastic possibility of seeing the city of Bengaluru outsource public transport services to private companies such as Uber and Ola in the future. His explanation is that unlike abroad, where ride-sharing apps fit into an existing city infrastructure, in Bengaluru, for instance, “ride-sharing apps are actually filling a gap that exists in the public transport infrastructure, which is still very patchy in the city, making it difficult to travel using a public transport system”. She adds: “So the problem you have here is that of having a private company in the position of being able to replace what the city is supposed to offer to its tax payers as a default.” In addition, being a contractor or freelancer in a city such as Bengaluru is very different than a city in Europe. “For many, being a contractor with a service such as Ola or UrbanClap means freedom from having to work seven days a week for a fixed, and very small, amount of money. In a way the sharing economy is offering a better pay, so the wave of app-based companies has allowed many to emancipate themselves in a way,” Ghidini says.

In ‘The Weight of Cloud Kitchens’ by Aasavri Rai and social entrepreneur Sunil Abraham, the full force of the environmental footprint our rampant food takeaway habits generate, is felt. An analysis of just 15 such platforms tell the story – an average of 67.072 grams of waste is generated for each order of a meal for one person in the price range of `200 to `300. Typically, 46.89 grams of non-biodegradable waste and 33.62 grams of biodegradable waste were generated across all orders. The writers write: ‘What is terrifying is that this investigation forms only a microcosm … With a reduction in dine-in customers and corresponding increase in home delivery across the city, the growth of waste production by this new generation of companies in the food and beverage industry gets magnified.’

Looking ahead

And yet, there is “a high degree of trust that people in India generally have with each other. Interestingly, it’s higher than most other countries of similar income levels,” Kashyap says in his interview. Which is why Krishnan believes the time has come for us to have more meaningful conversations about technology. She cites Time magazine’s 2006 declaration of how the individual controls the information age. “Technology operates in the social context it stems from and speaks to, and existing social iniquities are often exacerbated by technology. And so, instead of looking at technology as a way to solve problems, if the starting point is the issue stemming from the socio-political context, there can be more meaningful conversations on how technology can help.”