GLOBAL TRANSFORMATIONS IN

MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION RESEARCH

A PALGRAVE AND IAMCR SERIES

Platform Capitalism
in India
Edited by
Adrian Athique
Vibodh Parthasarathi

IAMCR
AIECS
AIERI
Global Transformations in Media and
Communication Research - A Palgrave
and IAMCR Series

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Adrian Athique • Vibodh Parthasarathi
Editors

Platform Capitalism
in India
Editors
Adrian Athique Vibodh Parthasarathi
Institute for Advanced Studies Centre for Culture Media and
Humanities Governance
University of Queensland Jamia Millia Islamia
St Lucia, QLD, Australia New Delhi, India

Global Transformations in Media and Communication Research - A Palgrave and

IAMCR Series
ISBN 978-3-030-44562-1    ISBN 978-3-030-44563-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44563-8

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This book is dedicated to Professor Tom O’Regan,
his unmatched grasp of ontology
and a fierce mind.
 Contents

1 Platform Economy and Platformization  1

Adrian Athique and Vibodh Parthasarathi

Part I Platform Capitalism  21

2 Digital Emporiums: Evolutionary Pathways to Platform

Capitalism 23
Adrian Athique

3 The Networked Media Economy and the Indian

Gilded Age 43
Scott Fitzgerald

4 The Derivative Values of Platform Capitalism 67

Akshaya Kumar

vii
viii Contents

Part II Platform Businesses  85

5 Amazon Prime Video: A Platform Ecosphere 87

Ishita Tiwary

6 Telecom and Technology Actors Repositioning Music

Streaming107
Christine Ithurbide

7 Industrial and Financial Structures of Over-the-Tops

(OTTs) in India129
Philippe Bouquillion

Part III Platform Workers 151

8 Journalistic Practices and Algorithmic Governance153

M. Shuaib Mohamed Haneef and Aquil Ahmad Khan

9 Inequalities in Ride-Hailing Platforms177

Ravinder Kumar Verma, P. Vigneswara Ilavarasan,
and Arpan Kumar Kar

Part IV Platform Politics 199

10 Aadhaar: Platform over Troubled Waters201

Pawan Singh

11 Political Communication on Social Media Platforms221

Usha Rodrigues

12 Portfolios of Fear and Risk in Platform News239

Hrishikesh Arvikar
 Contents  ix

Part V Platform Cultures 259

13 Informality in the Time of Platformization261

Akshaya Kumar

14 Notes on the Platformization of Mainstream Hinduism281

Pradip Thomas

15 Capitalist Platforms and Subaltern Creativity299

Amit Rai

Index317
 Notes on Contributors

Hrishikesh Arvikar is pursuing his PhD on Early Cinema in Bombay

Presidency—its developments, progressions and delineations—at the
School of Communication and Arts, University of Queensland. He has a
filmmaking diploma from Xavier Institute of Communications (XIC),
Mumbai. He later pursued his MPhil at Jawaharlal Nehru University
(JNU), New Delhi. His dissertation, titled The Cinema of Prabhat—
Histories, Aesthetics, and Politics (School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU),
dealt with questions of film practice, territoriality and studio space in
Western India in the late colonial period. He has published papers for
local, regional and international journals, including one on the polit-
ical economy of Prabhat studio published in Widescreen. He is writing
a monograph, two film scripts and a web series.
Adrian Athique is principal research fellow in Cultural Studies at the
University of Queensland. Adrian is the author of The Multiplex in India
(2010, with Douglas Hill), Indian Media: Global Approaches (2012),
Digital Media and Society (2013) and Transnational Audiences: Media
Reception at a Global Scale (2016). He has also edited volumes on The
Indian Media Economy (2 Vols., 2018, with Vibodh Parthasarathi and
S.V. Srinivas) and Digital Transactions in Asia (2019, with Emma
Baulch), and is co-editor of the journal Media International Australia and
the Oxford University Press series Media Dynamics in South
Asia. Adrian is collaborating with Shishir K. Jha, Pradip Thomas,

xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Vigneswara Ilavarasan and Scott Fitzgerald on the SPARC project Platform

Economies in Digital India: Assessing Implementation, Impact,
Infrastructure and Aptitude.
Philippe Bouquillion is Professor of Communication at the University
Sorbonne Paris Nord and a researcher at the Laboratory of Excellence
Cultural Industries and Artistic Creation and at the Laboratory of
Information and Communication Sciences. His work focuses on cultural
and creative industries and especially on the issues of concentration and
financialization, transnationalization and the transformations of
public policies in cultural and creative industries. His most recent
research deals with audiovisual digital platforms in Europe and India.
He has managed several research contracts, including contracts com-
missioned by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication
and the National Research Agency.
Scott Fitzgerald is a senior lecturer and discipline lead (People, Culture
and Organizations) in the School of Management at Curtin University in
Western Australia. His research interests cover the networked media
economy, cultural industry corporations and cultural work, as well as
public services (especially education) and new public management.
He is working on the Government of India SPARC project Platform
Economies in Digital India: Assessing Implementation, Impact,
Infrastructure and Aptitude as part of a research team led by Shishir K. Jha
and Adrian Athique. Scott is also an active member of IAMCR and the
South Asian Studies Association of Australia, which kindly funded the pre-
sentation and workshop of many of the papers included in this book at
Curtin University in July 2019.
M. Shuaib Mohamed Haneef is an assistant professor in the Department
of Electronic Media and Mass Communication, Pondicherry University,
India. His areas of interest include digital media and culture, specifically
focusing on interactivity and agency, digital journalism, algorithms and
digital media, and digital media and affect studies. He has published on
materiality of dress in digital media, art, protest and affect in digital
media, Deleuzian reading of music as well as digital art and so on. He
also edits an online open-access journal Communication and
Culture Review.
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii

Christine Ithurbide holds a PhD in Geography from Paris Diderot

University, is a postdoctoral researcher with the Laboratory of Information
and Communication Sciences (LabSIC) at Paris 13 University and an
associated member with the Centre de Sciences Humaines, New Delhi.
Her researches focus on cultural industries, economy and labour in India
in the context of globalization. Since 2017, she coordinates (with Philippe
Bouquillion) the research programme Cultural Industries in India:
Digital, Platforms and Regulation at LabEx ICCA and studies the deploy-
ment of digital technology and the reconfigurations of music and film
spaces, industries and economy, especially in Mumbai.
Arpan Kumar Kar is an associate professor in the Department of
Management Studies, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. His research
interests are in the domain of e-business, social media, e-governance, data
analytics and technology management. He has published over 75 articles
in reputed journals and is the managing editor of Global Journal of
Business & Knowledge Management and associate editor of Global
e-­
Journal of Flexible Systems Management. He has previously worked for the
Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Rohtak, IBM Research Laboratory
and Cognizant Business Consulting. Professor Kar has received multiple
awards and recognitions for his research from reputed organizations like
the Association of Indian Management Schools, Tata Consultancy
Services, Project Management Institute and IIM Rohtak.
Aquil Ahmad Khan is a full-time research scholar at the Department of
Electronic Media and Mass Communication, Pondicherry University. His
research interest includes political economy and digital journalism. He has
presented papers at national and international conferences. His doc-
toral research seeks to understand digital labour in select digital native
news websites in India.
Akshaya Kumar is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the School of
Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Indore.
His first monograph, Provincializing Bollywood: Bhojpuri Cinema in the
Comparative Media Crucible, is to be published under the Media
Dynamics in South Asia series of Oxford University Press. His interests
include the questions of capital, genre, stardom, provinciality and
language in Indian media, informal economies and platform capital-
ism. His essays have appeared in Postmodern Culture, Social Text, Media
Industries Journal, Television and New Media and various other journals.
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Vibodh Parthasarathi maintains a multidisciplinary interest in media

policy, creative industries and media history, his most recent work being
the co-edited double-volume The Indian Media Economy (2018). An asso-
ciate professor at Jamia Millia Islamia, he has been visiting scholar at KU
Leuven, the University of Queensland, the Indian Institute of
Technology Bombay and the University of Helsinki, besides ongoing affil-
iations at CMDS, Central European University and SASNET, Lund
University. He is a winner of numerous international grants, including
from the Ford Foundation, Canada’s IDRC, Social Science Research
Council, HIVOS and India New Zealand Education Council, besides
those from India’s University Grants Commission and ICSSR. Parthasarathi
has been invited in editorial advisory roles at Massachusetts Institute of
Technology Press and Oxford University Press, at the Journal of
Communication and Global Media and Communication and at the public
intellectual platform The Conversation. Presently he serves on the board of
the Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore) and on the executive coun-
cil of The Media Foundation (New Delhi). His recent work has been
exploring the dynamics of digitalization unfolding in various sites of the
Indian media, including in newspapers, journalism, broadcasting and cable
distribution. He is working on a book on media regulation in the longue
durée in modern India.
Amit Rai is Reader in Creative Industries and Arts Organisation and the
programme director of the MA Creative Industries and Arts Organisation
at Queen Mary University of London. He has previously taught at
Stanford, the New School for Social Research, Lorton Maximum
Security Prison, Georgetown University, the Tata Institute of Social
Sciences (Mumbai) and the Florida State University. Amit is the
author of Rule of Sympathy: Race, Sentiment, and Power, 1750–1860
(Palgrave, 2002), Untimely Bollywood: Globalisation and India’s New
Media Assemblage (2009) and Jugaad Time: Ecologies of Everyday Hacking
in India (2019), and has also written numerous articles for journals
throughout the world.
Usha Rodrigues is Senior Lecturer in Communication, with expertise in
journalism practice and scholarship, at Deakin University in Melbourne,
Australia. She is the co-author of three books, including two signifi-
cant works, Indian Media in a Globalised World (2010) and Indian
News Media: From Observer to Participant (2015). Usha has also under-
taken several studies in journalism, social media and political com-
munication, diversity and the media, globalization and new media
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv

technologies’ impact on journalism practice and citizen and commu-

nity media enterprise. Presently, she is investigating representation of
the #MeToo movement in the mainstream media and racism in fake
news circulated on various media platforms.
Pawan Singh holds a PhD in Communication from the University of
California San Diego. From 2016 to 2019, he was a New Generation
Network Scholar in Contemporary Histories at Deakin University and the
Australia India Institute. His work on digital identity and privacy
rights in the Indian context has been funded by the Toyota Foundation
Award for ‘exploring new values for society’ and the Digital Identity
Research Initiative fieldwork grant from the Indian School of
Business during 2018–2019. His manuscript addresses the adjudica-
tion of privacy as a fundamental right in India in relation to biomet-
ric identity, bodily autonomy and governance.
Pradip Thomas is an associate professor at the School of Communication
and Arts, University of Queensland. A previous vice-president of the
International Association of Media and Communications Research,
his work focuses on communication and social change, communica-
tion rights, political economy of communications, religion and media.
He is the author and editor of several books on the media in India,
including Strong Religion, Zealous Media: Christian Fundamentalism
and Communication in India (2008), Political Economy of Communications
in India: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (2010), Negotiating
Communication Rights: Case Studies from India (2011), Digital India:
Understanding Information, Communication and Social Change (2012),
Empire and Post-Empire Telecommunications in India: A History (2019)
and The Politics of Digital India: Between Local Compulsions and External
Pressures (2019).
Ishita Tiwary is a Horizon postdoctoral fellow at the Mel Hoppenheim
School of Cinema, Concordia University. Her research interests include
video cultures, media infrastructures, contraband media practices and
media aesthetics in South Asia. Her work has been published in
Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies, Post Script: Essays in Film and
Humanities and Marg: Journal of Indian Art, amongst others.
Ravinder Kumar Verma is a PhD student at the Department of
Management Studies, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi. His
doctoral topic is related to the digital economy in India. He also has
xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

research interests in e-governance, ICT4D and development studies. Prior

to joining IIT Delhi, Ravinder completed an MPhil in Planning and
Development at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. He also
holds a degree in Science from Gujarat University and an MBA with dis-
tinction from SCDL.
P. Vigneswara Ilavarasan is a professor in the Department of
Management Studies, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi. His
specific research interests are information and communication ­technologies
and development (ICTD), Indian IT industry and social media. Professor
Ilavrasan has been a recipient of the Outstanding Young Faculty Fellowship
Award at IIT Delhi and Prof. M.N. Srinivas Memorial Prize of the Indian
Sociological Society. He has held research grants from IDRC (Canada),
the Government of India, Oxford Analytica (UK), IPTS (European
Commission) and IdeaCorp (the Philippines). Previously, he has taught at
Pondicherry Central University and the Indian Institute of
Management Rohtak.
 List of Tables

Table 7.1 The financial dimension of OTT platforms. (Data source:

Economic Times 2019) 141
Table 9.1 Sample ratings of an Uber driver 182

xvii
 CHAPTER 1

Platform Economy and Platformization

Adrian Athique and Vibodh Parthasarathi

In this book, we begin to interrogate the phenomenon of India’s expand-

ing 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 sys-
tems 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 develop-
ing a markets-based approach towards the platform economy, we attempt
to outline the key motivating tendencies playing out across the interlock-
ing domains of commerce, technology, sociability and logistics. In doing

A. Athique (*)
Institute for Advanced Studies Humanities, University of Queensland,
St Lucia, QLD, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]
V. Parthasarathi
Centre for Culture Media and Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia,
New Delhi, India
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 1

A. Athique, V. Parthasarathi (eds.), Platform Capitalism in India,
Global Transformations in Media and Communication Research - A
Palgrave and IAMCR Series,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44563-8_1
2 A. ATHIQUE AND V. PARTHASARATHI

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 con-
tributors 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 multi-
tudinous 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 signifi-
cant 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 realiz-
ing 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 forg-
ing 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 har-
ness the benefits of automation, digitization and various avatars of artificial
intelligence.
 1 PLATFORM ECONOMY AND PLATFORMIZATION 3

Of itself, the $17 billion Digital India programme has become feasible
only because the mobile telecoms boom in the 2000s brought major busi-
ness 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 monop-
oly, 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 announce-
ment 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 develop-
ing digital start-ups and platform brands across a broad range of market-
places 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 epito-
mized by Reliance launching its Jio mobile network, along with Jio TV
and Jio Music (Mukherjee 2019). One feature of this expanding cornuco-
pia 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.
4 A. ATHIQUE AND V. PARTHASARATHI

Thus, for the verified users of Digital India, the burgeoning suite of plat-
forms 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 compre-
hend 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 intrin-
sic to the design and execution of the platform economy. Such an under-
taking goes beyond mapping synergies and subsidies, data exchanges and
algorithmic interoperability, or of the datafication and behavioural traits of
consumers. Rather, it requires us to grasp something of the underlying
impulse that drives this larger design: a platform ethos that might be cap-
tured by Appadurai’s consideration of the ‘spirit of calculation’ in our
times, or by the political economy of Srnicek, who describes the advent of
platforms as indicating the emergence of a novel form of ‘platform capital-
ism’ (Appadurai 2012; Srnicek 2017). Such analytical explanations of the
fundamentals of platform economy are reference points addressed
throughout this volume, most directly in the first part and in a number of
specific contexts in subsequent chapters. As scholars, we are also com-
pelled to consider the social and cultural forces and mores that are being
dis-embedded and re-organized by the platform economy in India. The
focus of the leading platform operators on remediating economies that
already exist, and which by their nature are deeply embedded in the cur-
rents of everyday life, necessarily inflects our understanding of the poten-
tials and implications of a Digital India.
It is also a point of significance that the sectors and activities being
refashioned under platform capitalism are overwhelmingly sectors previ-
ously located in the informal economy. The era of platforms marks an
expansion of the frontiers of the formal economy, meditating its integra-
tion with the informal economy and thereby affecting a greater intimacy
with everyday life. Rather than simply celebrating disruption for its own
sake (given such a condition is hardly novel for modern India), it is
 1 PLATFORM ECONOMY AND PLATFORMIZATION 5

important to apply a critical lens to the promise and potentials of the plat-
form economy. In the first place, we need to understand how platform
logics may or may not be applicable to India’s cultures, economy and
society, or more specifically, applicable to certain parts of it and not to oth-
ers. We also have to be aware that the stakes are high. The present focus of
investments in data centres, smart cities, digital transactions and 5G net-
works is taking place precisely at a moment when the Indian economy, like
others globally, is experiencing a slowdown in consumption, investment
and industrial output. After three decades of tangible growth, tax receipts
and employment are also tapering off. The international economic out-
look for 2020 is uncertain at best, and the informal sector has been in a
particular state of crisis since 2016. There is no escaping the fact that the
offerings of the platform economy, so heavily based around discretionary
spending and the convenience of delivery, are heavily disposed towards
urban and middle class consumers. The purported benefits for a large and
distressed rural sector, and for an equally large segment of the urban pop-
ulation on marginal incomes, have been widely touted but are yet to be
realized.
The remediation of public sector programmes operates as the central
strategy, intended to be underwritten by efficiency gains from automation
and taxes collected from smartphone spenders in urban India. This mode
of redistribution, notwithstanding the massive infrastructure costs that
will be required for some years to come, constitutes a great leap of faith in
the transformative power of the digital. For this reason, the contributors
to this volume have been asked to consider both the ethos of platform
capitalism and its rendering in contexts particular to India. At the same
time, we have also been prompted to go beyond the description of socio-­
economic phenomena, however distinctive, in order to identify the ante-
cedents of the platform economy in the domains and exemplars under
analysis. In that sense, our impetus is to challenge the persistent novelty of
digital aspiration and to clearly identify the trajectories that we now see
converging in the present socio-technical interface. To put that more sim-
ply, the platform economy did not emerge fully formed from the most
widely held smartphone in a single decade. Rather, it was preconceived
and predisposed by a series of long term evolutions in informatics, com-
merce, governance and popular culture over the course of a century.
Consequently, we need to understand the emergence of platforms in his-
torical terms and to understand platform structures and businesses as con-
stituting actions rather than objects of analysis. As with the governing
6 A. ATHIQUE AND V. PARTHASARATHI

mentalities of development in India past and present, ‘platformization’, as

the verb form of ‘platform’, compels an analytical emphasis on process
(Parthasarathi 2018; Nieborg and Helmond 2019; Zhang 2020).

Platformization as a Verb
In terms of technological processes, platformization can be understood in
a number of ways: in terms of interoperability, hyperconnectivity, individ-
ual addressability and algorithmic automation. As a configuration of
media, a more general tendency of platformization can be traced via the
effective convergence between the domains of mediation and communica-
tion. Consequently, the sensory melding of media content and interper-
sonal communication is a vital process within the aesthetics of platforms.
In more functional terms, mobile phones have converged the enabling
and entertainment functions of media, rapidly breaking down distinctions
between public mediation, commercial logistics and interpersonal com-
munication. In this context, we have to consider whether we should main-
tain a distinction between the platformization of an Indian media economy
(i.e. the convergence between a set of content-producing industries with
particular social, cultural and commercial logics) and platformization via
the increasingly mediated economy of India (where an apparatus of infor-
mation technologies converges logistical processes, monetary exchanges
and political action) (see Athique 2018, pp. 2–3). This distinction is espe-
cially important in setting the boundaries of where media and communi-
cations research should begin and end in the era of platforms. In a larger
sense, as the complexity of media systems increases, a mediated economy
becomes substantially more dependent upon the parallel expansion of the
media economy and vice versa. Here, we can say with some confidence
that one major trajectory of platformization is to bring these two com-
munication domains within a single process. In turn, as the dominant
social mediums of contemporary society, the interrelated development of
the mobile phone and the Internet implies large-scale re-­orderings of
sociability and social relations as economic processes.
Platformization is, of course, a global tendency, which usefully reminds
us that the worldwide reach of the Internet remains as radical as its quali-
ties of interactivity and simultaneity. Consequently, the combination of
global expansion and procedural platformization compels us to consider a
vast complex of transnational trade flows entailing e-commerce, cross-­
border wallets and online video. For instance, although Netflix makes
 1 PLATFORM ECONOMY AND PLATFORMIZATION 7

products from various countries available in many other countries, the

overall pattern of distribution advantages US-origin products (Aguiar and
Waldfogel 2017). At the same time, supposedly global platforms such as
Netflix tend to gather different meanings and orientations across different
jurisdictions and cultures (Lobato 2019a). Scholars record users in India
having similar understandings of gratification derived from, say Airbnb,
with users in other national cultures (Brochado et al. 2017). Yet, even a
cursory look at the actual operations of Airbnb in India indicates impor-
tant disjunctures with universal rationales for such ‘sharing economies’.
Despite the stark geopolitical disparities of the digital economy, the global
dynamics of platformization require more than an ‘indigenization’ argu-
ment, as both Airbnb and Uber have come to be swiftly integrated into
pre-existing practices of service provision in India, both formal and infor-
mal. Such adaptation is by no means unidirectional, as we must also be
attentive to Indian platforms that are operating outside the country’s
geography (see, e.g., Lobato 2019b). Websites of leading news outlets in
India garner over a third of their viewers from abroad, the cab service
platform Ola operates in Australia and the UK, as does hotel booking
platform OYO in China and Southeast Asia. Thus, the interlacing and
extension of the Indian economy beyond its sovereign jurisdiction is also
fundamental to platformization as process.
Within India, platformization ‘as a verb’ allows us to locate and expli-
cate the platform economy via the evolution of certain structures, institu-
tions, settings and norms (such as the census, the bourses, union ministries,
urban master plans, conglomerates and party political structures). This
undeniably complex field of precedents provides the basis for a more dis-
cerning understanding of longer term tendencies that have shaped the
present pursuit of a platform economy in India. Here, the tendencies of
platformization can been identified across various processes: the inexora-
ble pressures of massification, the mechanization of information, the auto-
mation of industrial processes, the globalization of service economies, the
formalization of social exchanges, the exploitation of mediatized sociabil-
ity and the interdependency of public and private marketplaces. It is
through a complex aggregation and simultaneity of all these trajectories
that platformization emerges as a novel mechanism to organize and re-­
formulate markets in India, where digitization is energetically touted in
government ads as ‘the solution to all problems’. Accordingly, the various
contributors to this volume begin to consider how the universal ethos of
‘platformization’ has become operative across different domains. Before
8 A. ATHIQUE AND V. PARTHASARATHI

proceeding to those accounts, we will briefly consider indicators of plat-

formization across four vectors: (1) the extension of the existing media
economy through new commodity platforms, (2) the expansion of the
mediated economy to new adopters and sectors through distribution plat-
forms, (3) the formalization of social economies through their enclosure
within exchange platforms and (4) the platformization of state functions
and governance of platforms.

Platformization in the Media Economy

Platformization, as a means of fashioning communication within a set of
channels, with attendant feedback loops and sets of secondary markets for
information and influence, is an economic logic that has evolved from the
particular characteristics of media. One of the most significant antecedents
of platformization is television, with its longstanding investments in the
identification, enumeration and behavioural understandings of its audi-
ence (Balnaves and O’Regan 2011). The commercial evolution of televi-
sion through branded channels, subscription models, encrypted signals
and dual product markets centred on advertising revenues clearly predis-
poses the logics of the platform era. In India, the platformization of televi-
sion emerged out of the cable sector, largely informal, and the de-regulation
of broadcasting in the early 1990s. In the 2010s, the re-regulation and
digitalization of cable networks furthered the platformization of television
via proprietary set top boxes, encrypted signal flows, the bundling of TV
content and on-demand, often exclusive, programming. Thus, arguably,
the institution of multi-sided markets for content and market data became
formalized in the Indian media economy via cable TV. The legal privileges
of platform status were also first claimed in this industry. The earliest
satellite-­based PayTV services in India referred to themselves in policy
deliberations as ‘platforms’, emphasizing their distinction as services not
merely relaying signals of broadcasters but also offering their own inter-
faces and suites of programming. Subsequently, the mandatory digitaliza-
tion of the distribution chain for cable-based Pay TV services facilitated a
convergence with the telecoms sector that, in turn, brought about stan-
dardization in network infrastructures, signal flows and retail price-points
(Parthasarathi et al. 2016).
The formalization of the trade in TV signals in such a manner funda-
mentally re-organized TV as a commercial and viewing experience.
Platformization marked a significant shift in the regime of legibility (i.e.
 1 PLATFORM ECONOMY AND PLATFORMIZATION 9

identifying/enumerating audiences), with the monopoly of third-party,

‘independent’ ratings agencies giving way to TV distributors, armed with
their ability to harvest not just a sample but the complete universe of
audience-preferences. Thus, in television, a technological convergence
enabled the incorporation of erstwhile market mediators within the pro-
prietary domain of platforms. In parallel, television provided the founda-
tions for the co-location of content, advertising and material retail systems.
Here, cable distributors such as DEN, through a JV partnership with
Snapdeal, launched a cable TV channel aiming to leverage its footprint of
13 million homes in 200 cities as a marketplace for merchandise. A raft of
web-based TV and OTT video services also entered the market, including
offerings from transnational broadcasters such Murdoch-owned STAR
and Sony. Platformizing their content catalogues (through HotStar and
SonyLIV, respectively) is a strategy that reflects a significant shift of audi-
ences from conventional to mobile TV. In the last three years, the number
of OTT operations in India has increased to around 30, with local
broadcaster-­owned platforms, telecom operators and global players like
Netflix and Amazon Primer all entering the market with advertisement
(AVOD) and subscription video on demand (SVOD) services (see
Fitzgerald 2019). These developments emerge from the convergence of
the television sector with other sectors, especially between content-based
media industries and the telecoms sector via internet-enabled services.
In market terms, the platformization of the television medium via OTT
formats has emerged in the context of a rapidly expanding but simultane-
ously fragmenting audience. Online music platforms such as Saavn are
similarly diversifying content and consolidating ownership in the popular
music market (see Booth 2017). The reshaping of movie distribution via
OTT platforms, and their bundling with telecoms services, has encapsu-
lated the home cinema market. Outside the home, the majority of ‘stand-­
alone’ cinema halls have been platformized through the technical standards
imposed by E cinema and D cinema platforms, now firmly consolidated
under UFO Moviez. In conceiving their ‘platform’ offerings, editors and
management at Indian newspapers have negotiated various forms of risk,
especially those around editorial control (brand attribution, context,
onward journey), data (access to individual-level information about users)
and the monetization of audiences as they compete for a shrinking share
of advertising in India’s digital space. As a counterpoint, a vociferous space
of independent journalism has utilized the carriage provided by platforms
such as YouTube and Facebook to sustain an idealistic critique of scrutiny
10 A. ATHIQUE AND V. PARTHASARATHI

and dissent. Here, the refugees of serious journalism rub shoulders with
immensely popular channels marking the boisterous expansion of folk and
regional cultures. In an era of public communication centred upon the
handset, the production and circulation of news in India has been entirely
transformed (Jeffrey and Doron 2013; Sundaram 2017). Across all these
domains we are witnessing the subsumption of the erstwhile ‘media indus-
tries’ under the imperium of providers of digital infrastructure.

Platformization in the Mediated Economy

Underlying processes of communication, datafication and algorithmic
reproduction are driving the platformization of the wider economy in
India. At an obvious and basic level, platformization constitutes a techno-
logical precondition for a mediated economy where digital systems oper-
ate as carriers of logistical services to a vast range of markets. At the point
of sale, the central infrastructure is mobile phone networks, whose propri-
etary platforms underwrite and determine access to digital technologies.
The critical function of mobile telecoms, as the enabler of a mass Internet
in India, and their steady consolidation under three big houses has been
central to the creation of a viable market for platform services. The vast
resources need to implement and under-write wireless coverage in India
via the private sector has led inexorably to a sector dominated by India’s
largest business houses and their foreign counterparts. The convergence
of telecoms and Internet in a rapidly expanding global data economy also
convenes a similar set of actors on the client side, with Tata, Amazon and
Google all holding key components of the data infrastructure, both
nationally and internationally. Tendencies towards enclosure in the mobile
market have been manifested through ‘walled gardens’ that lock in users
via contracts and the lure of added-value services and special offers.
However, given that the bulk of India’s mobile users rely on sachetized
prepaid vouchers and often have only intermittent access to power and
network, there are critically important differentiations in the digital expe-
rience amongst users from different social strata, reflected in terms of the
platform services that they are able to access, utilize and pay for.
The vast overall increases in connectivity, datafication and data genera-
tion in the mobile domain necessarily converge with the particular plat-
form logics of the software industries. Here, the trajectories of
platformization can be traced back through the history of commercial
computing, with key moments being the intellectual property stand-off
 1 PLATFORM ECONOMY AND PLATFORMIZATION 11

between India and IBM in the 1970s, the rise of commercial software in
personal computers and the entrenchment of proprietary operating sys-
tems during the 1980s and 1990s. More recently, these tendencies have
been playing out in the mobile platform wars between Samsung and
Apple, Android and OS. It is significant that the private sector in India
remains almost entirely dependent upon these major international soft-
ware platforms. This platform dependency has clearly structured the
much-vaunted development of the Indian software industry, with its long-
standing and far-reaching relationships with Silicon Valley (D’Costa and
Sridharan 2004). In the public sector, by contrast, India has made sub-
stantive investments in domestic software platforms intended to enable
the logistical functions of state enterprises and services. Nonetheless, at
the level of network infrastructure, it is the private sector (specifically,
Reliance, Tata and Adani) that is making the capital investments in fibre,
data centres and cellular coverage. Similarly, it is private-sector platforms
that provide the mobile user interface, with many of these platforms being
owned and/or carried by the network owners. In this sandwich, public
sector software initiatives are clearly intended to piggy back on private and
‘public-private’ infrastructure, while the public sector infrastructure initia-
tives face mixed fortunes. It appears they are either being left to starve
under the ambit of divestment (such as BSNL, the country’s largest wired-­
line telephone network) or condemned to a slow and chequered roll-out
(as with the high-speed broadband network Bharat-Net).
The divergent fortunes of private and public sector infrastructure indi-
cate that the platformization of infrastructure is an underlying process
determining the techno-organizational backbone of Digital India. The
putative gains derived from platformization of the entire economy are
associated with step changes in logistics. In this utopian form, platformiza-
tion becomes applicable to each and every aspect of the material environ-
ment, tracking public transportation, health and security and enabling
seamless consumption linked to unique individuals across space and time.
Yet in India, the pronouncement of funding for a hundred technologically
enhanced ‘smart cities’ in 2019 has already dwindled to a much lower
target of five, with the flagship development of a new state capital in
Andhra Pradesh repeatedly reformulated and yet to get underway, despite
the acquisition of swathes of agricultural land. As has been the case else-
where, the automation of urban logistics is proceeding via more piecemeal
developments in pre-existing urban spaces. Here, the rapid growth of
smartphone-enabled ride hailing platforms (RHPs) has been the most
12 A. ATHIQUE AND V. PARTHASARATHI

visible and popular innovation. The offerings of Uber and its indigenous
competitor, Ola, has transformed the transport economies of Indian cities
in terms of availability and pricing, even though it has yet to make any
significant contribution to reducing horrendous levels of traffic conges-
tion and pollution. This literal choking of urban India has itself provided
an impetus in demand for food delivery platforms like Zomato and Swiggy,
and for the overall growth in online shopping.
Perhaps the highest profile intervention of the digital in the wider
economy was the arbitrary demonetization of 80% of India’s cash supply
on 8 November 2016. The coerced expansion of digital money platforms
such as PayTM was part and parcel of the conscious disruption of the
world’s largest cash economy (Ghosh et al. 2017; Athique 2019). Since
2016, the range and availability of payment platforms, mobile wallets and
Fintech companies has increased dramatically. Digital payments by various
means have become widely accepted in metropolitan India, and platform
providers are expanding into a broader range of financial services. The
various interests in what is, effectively, the platformization of money have
been strongly supported by the government as a systemic intervention
that will increase tax collections, reduce criminality and curb the influence
of black money across the economy (Reddy 2017). The sanctioned ‘cash-
less India’ initiative is also being prioritized because digital transactions are
functionally intrinsic to boosting the platform economy in India. Here,
mobile money services offer the means by which platform business models
become cost efficient and, to a significant extent, financialized. The newly
minted status of platforms as financial entities becomes almost inevitable
once they become the banking channel for substantial money exchanges
between users (as, for example, with the aggregation of daily transport
fares by RHPs in a populous city like New Delhi). Digital monies, in this
larger sense, operate simultaneously as logistics, resources and commodi-
ties in the platform economy, interacting with and under-writing the net-
work infrastructure (see Athique and Baulch 2019).

Platformization of the Social

Thus far, we have traced platformization through developments in the
channelling and logistics of economic processes. At this point, it is useful
to turn to the human dimensions of those changes. It is worth noting at
the outset that the primary resources of the platform economy are funda-
mentally social and cultural in nature. The dis-embedding and
 1 PLATFORM ECONOMY AND PLATFORMIZATION 13

re-­embedding of symbolic and social exchanges in commodity forms has

always been a central feature of media economies (See Athique,
Parthasarathi and Srinivas 2018a, b). This cycle of extraction has been
tremendously accelerated by the explosion of social media networks in
India. Through the popularity of Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter and
Instagram our interactions with family, friends and strangers are commod-
ified via the panoply of data packs, data points and targeted advertising.
Shaped by the compulsive affordances of public sharing, our competitive
pursuit of personal publics is quantified in fine detail by the page views,
click trails, recommendations and likes that have emerged as effective cur-
rencies of social capital. The substantive point is that the monetization of
various forms of user data impels the simultaneous integration of platform
logics within the nooks and corners of everyday speech (Athique 2020).
In aggregate, this dynamic has been highly visible in the day-to-day con-
duct of the electoral circus in India, where aspirant parliamentarians com-
pete frantically for attention and bandwidth through live interventions in
public discourse and debate. At the village level, a similar dynamic plays
out through the cellular affordances of WhatsApp, with increasingly tragic
consequences around incidences of incitement and violence via the circu-
lation of false and unverified news.
These incidents and their public reactions are emerging as an unin-
tended consequence of the orchestrated commercialization of sociability
itself, where ‘clickbait’ has been an explicit tendency of platformization in
India as much as elsewhere. At an equally embedded level, we have seen a
rapid expansion in the platformization and commodification of religious
practices via websites, podcasts and e commerce. Here, platformization
has been enabled by the increasingly mediatized milieu around all reli-
gions and the social infrastructure created by networks of devotees, volun-
teers and patrons (see Chakrabarti 2012; Thomas 2018). We can also see
the antecedents of platformization in the mediatization of marriage bro-
kerages. In the mid-1990s, the match making website Shaadi.com was an
early example of digital platformization, linking local cultural practices and
social preferences with new processes of sorting, selecting and ‘consumer’
experience (Parthasarathi 2018a). As of now, the sociability afforded by
such ‘relationship’ platforms are being complemented, and sometimes
challenged, by social media networks and location-based mobile-dating
applications such as Tinder, TrulyMadly and OkCupid. Rudimentary
industry surveys suggest that Indian dating apps will gain in popularity as
they offer more choice, more profile information and opportunities to
14 A. ATHIQUE AND V. PARTHASARATHI

meet potential partners and connect online, thereby boosting the $40 bil-
lion marriage business in India. In both domains, we can see how plat-
formization is bringing legibility to very substantial areas of financial
exchange that have not previously been considered within economic
accounting. Nonetheless, matrimony and religion are big business in
India, and both rely on network effects that make them prime sites for
platformization (in this vector, of sociability itself).
The mining of social data and speech, and the automation of social
economies, goes hand in hand with the wider encroachment of Digital
India into the country’s large informal sector. Traditionally, this sector has
employed some 85% of the workforce, but contributed very little to state
revenues. It has been reckoned to be as large as the formal sector in terms
of turnover, and therefore the aggregation of informal activities is an obvi-
ous objective for platform start-ups. In this domain, the imperatives of
platforms are both similar to and distinct from their inspirations in the
US. There, the ‘sharing economy’ paradigm is mobilized upon the pursuit
of spare capacity in private hands (Sundararajan 2016). In India, the cap-
ture of informal businesses within online brokerages is harnessing central
capacity within the economy, with the intent of capturing rents and, per-
haps, making those sectors both legible and more efficient. In both cases,
we could see this strategic pursuit of social resources as a capitalism of last
resort, spurred on by falling state revenues and declining profitability in
the industrial economy. The ‘sharing’ tag is largely redundant in India,
where it is extremely unlikely that an Uber driver is anything other than a
regular taxi driver employed under different (and often precarious) condi-
tions. Similarly, Airbnb in India is dominated by listings for registered
guesthouses and private apartment lets, since the complexities of caste,
diet and local conventions around visitors and communal ‘decency’ make
the freeform rental of spare rooms to complete strangers a problematic
proposition. Rather, the central drive of ‘sharing’ services in urban India
has been the platformization of domestic spaces and informal labour, from
drivers to cooks, security guards and household servants.

Platformization and Governance

Although e-governance is only one of the nine pillars of the government’s
‘Digital India’ initiative, the implementation of e-governance platforms
clearly reflects the perennial imperative to simply manage the vast and
disparate population of the country (GoI 2018). At the core is Aadhaar,
designed to digitally identify the entire population, thereby providing new
 1 PLATFORM ECONOMY AND PLATFORMIZATION 15

capacity for the state and a new transactional relationship with citizens
(Shukla 2010). Following the administratively aggressive and judicially
fraught implementation of the world’s largest and most ambitious citizen
identification project, the subsequent platformization of government
functions has been touted as the means by which corruption and pilferage
will be driven out of the welfare system (Aiyar 2017). As with ‘cashless
India’, a rhetorical drive towards ‘purification’ has been enacted through
the digitization of citizen registrations and enforcement. In this endeav-
our, the Indian government has developed a close working relationship
with Silicon Valley, positioning India as a vast laboratory for the imple-
mentation of digital society. At the same time, the government has facili-
tated the rise of its own national champions, frequently by sidestepping its
own laws and regulatory bodies. This close cohabitation with the digital
sector, both at home and abroad, raises critical questions around the state’s
role as the watchdog and arbiter of data privacy, competition and spec-
trum licensing in the platform economy. The critical issue is that, in such
circumstances, the governance of platforms is not easily separated from
the platformization of governance itself. Consequently, platformization
raises regulatory challenges for the state, while simultaneously becoming
central to its administrative ambitions.
In both private and public sectors, platforms connecting service provid-
ers, with each other and with consumers, are often discordant with the
principles, and indeed the letter, of regulations. On the government side,
it remains unclear which components of the platform economy fall into
the regulatory ambit of various ministries and regulatory bodies, and there
are legitimate concerns whether existing principles of governance can be
applied to the digital platform economy as it expands across numerous
sectors. At the international level, there is a corresponding set of chal-
lenges around international bodies, jurisdictions and domicile that requires
concerted action by sovereign states in what is an increasingly febrile inter-
national system. It is clear that implementing robust forms of governance
in the platform economy is a pressing issue, not least because platforms
themselves are effectively acting as forms and sites of governance in their
own domains. For our purposes, we can therefore identify that a further
trajectory of platformization is the shift from territorial governance, within
a jurisdiction with elected representatives, to functional governance on/
by the platform itself (see Parthasarathi 2018b). The former tends to defer
governance issues to ‘community accountability’ on the part of users or,
arguably, more insidious forms like content moderation by outsourced
employees. The latter plays out through forms of distributed intervention
16 A. ATHIQUE AND V. PARTHASARATHI

of through forms of self-regulation. In their own ways, both of these carry

risks associated with the ‘logic of opacity’ in platform regulation
(Roberts 2018).
In public sector services, the government of India has embraced plat-
form models in the name of efficiency gains. These are assumed to flow
from simultaneous data exchanges across departments, the elimination of
corruption and duplication, and the lowering of the number of employ-
ees, real estate and resources used to conduct state functions. Automation
in this domain also suggests that the state is seeking, via technological
means, to operate transactions with (often unruly) citizens at a more con-
venient distance. This certainly seems to be particularly the case for welfare
systems like PDS, which are a matter of life and death for millions of
people in India (see Mishra 2019). Community policing is increasingly
operationalized through social media monitoring and interventions via
Facebook and WhatsApp (Sundaram 2017). Internet shutdowns have
become a normalized mode of collective punishment, more notoriously in
the case of Jammu and Kashmir after the dissolution of its special consti-
tutional status in 2019. In recent years, the allocation of digital identities
has become a mechanism for exclusion as much as inclusion, creating mil-
lions of stateless people through both system errors and political fiat.
India’s model of e-governance has thus shown itself to be arbitrary and
unaccountable. The shouldering of the costs of such interventions by the
private sector inexorably leads to the dispersal of state sovereign functions,
as in the increasing outsourcing of surveillance and financial systems to
private players. A cogent example is the free flows of user transaction data
between platform operators and state agencies, along with the securitiza-
tion of public data from the citizenry. Consequently, we can argue that the
implicit transfer of sovereign rights, if not sovereign privilege, to the pri-
vate sector is a central tendency of platformization.

Critical Approaches to Platforms

Having explored something of the complexity of India’s platform econ-
omy as a set of interlocking social and economic processes, and having
identified some of the vectors of platformization, we can now open the
floor for discussion. We are both pleased and honoured to have the oppor-
tunity to curate a series of highly original contributions that range across
different themes, topics and sites of research. Each of the chapters that
follow provides thoughtful insights on the ethos, particularities and
 1 PLATFORM ECONOMY AND PLATFORMIZATION 17

trajectories of platform capitalism in India. In Part I of the volume Adrian

Athique, Scott Fitzgerald and Akshaya Kumar interrogate the concept of
platform capitalism in an Indian context. In Part II, Ishita Tiwary, Christine
Ithurbide and Phillipe Bourquillon illustrate the dynamics of platform
businesses in the media sector. Ravinder Kumar Verma, Vigneswara
Ilavarasan, Arpan Kumar Kar, M. Shuaib Mohamed Haneef and Aquil
Ahmad Khan then direct our attention to the lived experience of platform
labour. In Part IV, Pawan Singh, Usha Rodrigues and Hrishikesh Arvikar
explore the political manifestations of the platform economy. This turn to
the social domain is further enhanced by insightful accounts of the cultural
aspects of platformization, with contributions from Akshaya Kumar,
Pradip Thomas and Amit Rai. Naturally the scale of the task means that
there are many more platforms that deserve attention, and our under-
standing of the vectors of platformization will be further enhanced as
research in the field progresses. In that respect, we hope that the generous
contributions made here will provide useful stimulus for researchers, in
India and elsewhere, as we collectively explore the era of platforms.

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 PART I

Platform Capitalism
 CHAPTER 2

Digital Emporiums: Evolutionary Pathways

to Platform Capitalism

Adrian Athique

Emporia Redux
In Janpath, a major thoroughfare at the heart of Lutyen’s New Delhi,
stands a series of state-operated emporiums offering goods from across
India. In a concretization of the political and economic relationships of
the 1970s, the row of emporiums offering wares from specific Indian
states sits across the road from the towering structure of the All India
Central Cottage Industries Emporium. As reminders of the heyday of the
command economy era under Indira Gandhi, Delhi’s handicraft empori-
ums continue to offer customers a consciously curated array of goods,
enclosed within a tightly regulated space where the inefficiencies and has-
sles of everyday exchange are negated by the standardization of both
prices and goods under the aegis of the state. They also deliver. A reminder
of the rational promises of a receding era, these emporia in turn reference
the retail emporiums that appeared in global metropoles at the end of the

A. Athique (*)
Institute for Advanced Studies Humanities, University of Queensland,
St Lucia, QLD, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 23

A. Athique, V. Parthasarathi (eds.), Platform Capitalism in India,
Global Transformations in Media and Communication Research - A
Palgrave and IAMCR Series,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44563-8_2
24 A. ATHIQUE

nineteenth century, heralding the era of the urban department store.

Beyond its historical resonance as a grandiose sensory-retail experience, I
propose that the emporium might serve us well as both a metaphor and a
structural analogy for India’s emerging ‘platform economy’, through its
component qualities and their attendant vectors:

1. The emporium pioneered a multi-product retail space with disparate

supply chains, thereby marking the historical co-evolution of the
colonial bazaar and global trade.
2. The emporium materialized the enclosure of goods and services
under a branded banner, thereby reflecting the commanding logics
of aggregation and enclosure evident in platform business models.
3. The emporium showcased the diversity of product origins, cultural
markets and social transactions being captured, thereby foreshadow-
ing the dynamics of discovery in the platform economy.
4. The emporium responded to the densification and machination of
urban life, thereby occupying a central position around which trans-
port, entertainment and service economies were organized.
5. The emporium evolved into the modern department stores, which
introduced the system of cashless transactions that enable platform
businesses in the present era.
6. The emporium referenced the capacity of privatized markets to
determine both products and subjects, thereby echoing the founda-
tion of modern India on the commercial sovereignty of the
Company Raj.

Amidst the discourses of novelty and disruption circulating in both

public and private sector offices regarding the disruptive effects of Digital
India, this more evolutionary perspective allows us to situate ‘platform
capitalism’ as a phenomenon emerging from the extension and conver-
gence of long-term tendencies in media markets. It also implies a substan-
tially sui generis approach to platform capitalism in India, on the basis that
platform economies tend to ‘platformize’ existing market exchanges rather
than fashion new objects of exchange. As Julie Cohen puts it: ‘platforms
do not enter or expand markets; they replace (and rematerialize) them’
(Cohen 2017). For this reason, I have argued that internet-enabled plat-
forms are perhaps best understood as attempts to constitute a transac-
tional layer over and above existing markets and social relations (see
Athique and Baulch 2019). In a structural sense, it is clear that the major
 2 DIGITAL EMPORIUMS: EVOLUTIONARY PATHWAYS TO PLATFORM… 25

platforms are seeking to establish proprietary markets, or ‘ecosystems’,

within the commercial geography of India. Such ambitions are, of course,
quite familiar and consistent with India’s economic history. Equally, while
the rapid ‘platformization’ of peer-to-peer exchanges may well be novel in
devices, scope and form, the multi-sided market logics of platform busi-
nesses clearly extend tendencies long evident in media economies (See
Athique et al. 2018a, b). Due to the intrinsically embedded nature of
mediation, the substantive point of novelty may well be the protocols
through which digital platforms are seeking to channel India’s informal
and social economies (see Kumar 2019; Rai 2019).

Digital Emporiums
We can develop the structural analogy of the emporium by demonstrating
the continuation of its major vectors in the evolution of India’s platform
economy. The most obvious examples of the multi-product marketplace
are in e-commerce, including the Amazon-inspired FlipKart platform, and
Amazon itself in its Indian manifestation. Beyond the virtualization of the
everyday marketplace, the mutual constitution of retail and service plat-
forms brings together goods, labour and cultures from across India, as the
state emporiums once did, but now recasts the retail space across the larger
pan-Indian space previously offered up as a metropolitan fantasy. Where
the consumer was once configured as a benevolent bureaucrat or interna-
tional tourist, the all-India market array is now configured for the benefit
of the urban middle class consumers mobilized through three decades of
liberalization (see Varma 1998; Srivastava 2014). As Pradip Thomas has
noted, the looming enclosure of India’s vast middle class of small-scale
producers and retailers within the online retail space has been figured as
both an economic and a political threat by influential components within
the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) (Thomas 2019a). At the same
time, Indian retailers have proved adept in marketing their own goods
worldwide through global platform outlets, while the Government of
India has moved somewhat erratically between regulatory protection for
local producers and regulatory loopholes allowing WalMart and Amazon
to establish a duopoly in the servicing of online distribution (Thomas
2019b). This statutory equivalence stems not only from overlapping and
outmoded ministerial jurisdictions, but directly from the Government of
India’s reliance on technology companies to provide the pipes and
26 A. ATHIQUE

platforms necessary for realizing its ‘Digital India’ vision of aggregated

and automated governance (Mukherjee 2019).
The orientation of platforms offering services (such as food, taxis,
domestic labour) and the offering of platforms selling goods (with their
multiple tie-up offers for film tickets, virtual cashback and coffee vouch-
ers) indicate marketing logics that firmly position customers within an
urban leisure economy (see Athique and Hill 2010; Brosius 2012).
Nonetheless, like the erstwhile colonial bazaar described by Ray, Bannerjee
and others, the wider platform ecology brings a proliferation of communi-
ties and cultures into contact via open platforms such as WhatsApp and
YouTube (See Bannerjee 1989; Chakrabarty 1991; Ray 1995; Parthasarathi
and Athique 2019). In the latter case, intensely local popular cultures
across India have established channels alongside the exotica of foreign
content that lures urban elites to Netflix (Lobato 2019). As meeting
points for so many vernaculars of culture and commerce, the User
Generated Content (UGC) platforms are unruly spaces where the senso-
rial spectrum of the digital breaks through the logics of aggregation in all
directions (Srinivas 2017). At the back end, the new market regimes for
platform labour (i.e. for cooks, drivers, guards and maids) instituted by
service platforms like Zomato, Ola and UrbanClap link them directly into
the stratified layers of India’s informal economy. In doing so, the complex
relationships between improvisational and marginal spaces of the digital
and the affordances of automated consumers armed with smartphones are
remediating power and precarity through new forms of algorithmic disci-
pline. A gig economy is, of course, nothing new to India’s expansive pool
of marginal and migrant labour, but the rating of their daily fortunes by
digital brands threatens to make these entities curators of the informal sec-
tor in much the same fashion that state emporia were once the curators of
village handicrafts.
Platforms operationalize machine logics of efficiency and control and,
like emporiums before them, they furnish a distinct set of transactional
logics. Automation is deployed to increase the scale, scope, speed and
volume of transactions, and an important element of this is the centraliza-
tion of money exchanges (Athique 2019a). A key component of the archi-
tecture of emporiums was their central payments space, and mobile
payment systems occupy this critical space within the ecology of platforms.
Thus, we also have to understand the emporium and the platform as vast
mechanisms for handling money. The aggregation of cash fosters market
power and the ability to carry loss-leaders, paving the way for regimes of
 2 DIGITAL EMPORIUMS: EVOLUTIONARY PATHWAYS TO PLATFORM… 27

brand loyalty embedded in the expansion of consumer credit. In the

Indian context, where the vast bulk of petty exchanges have operated in
the informal and untaxed sector, the imposition of central accounting
regimes also constitutes an overarching ‘mechanism of legibility’ that
scrutinizes even the smallest symptom of leakage. The production of
transaction records is itself central to the business of governance, and the
capacity of mobile payment systems to provide integrated individualized
transaction records makes them intrinsic to the nervous system of the
state. No one doubts that the near simultaneous launch of mobile money
platforms such as PayTM in 2015 and the shock demonetization of the
cash supply in 2016 were conjoint processes (Athique 2019b). State
patronage for a ‘cashless India’ is reciprocated by the sharing of transac-
tion data, where PayTM records facilitate revenue collection and the secu-
rity profiling of citizens in Kashmir and elsewhere.

The Metaphors of Platform Capitalism

The structural analogy of the emporium is useful, then, for situating the
digital ‘disruption’ of India within a longer evolution of retail and control
regimes. By contrast, taking the ‘digital emporium’ as a metaphor allows
us to de-naturalize the hegemonic metaphors of ‘platform capitalism’. In
the colonial metropoles, the emporium was in its day an unabashed meta-
phor for the expansive conquests of global trade, bringing an expansive
range of material and ethnological goods from the far flung corners of
empire. This etymology was echoed in India’s state emporiums of the
1970s, where the diverse products of India’s villages economies were
aggregated at the federal centre. Then, as now, imperial instincts were
driving a centrifugal impulse, as Delhi worked to rationalize and subdue
India’s federal patchwork. Thus, in both cases, the shared etymology
between emporium and imperium unabashedly highlights the intertwined
logics of market integration and territorial commerce. By contrast, the
modern-day metaphors associated with the platform economy are wilfully
evasive. To begin with, the metaphor of ‘cloud computing’ provided a
non-threatening overlay to the worldwide harvest of information, argu-
ably the greatest power grab in human history (Athique 2013). The
accompanying metaphor of the platform, as Tarleton Gillespie argued,
infers a non-threatening neutrality and a multi-faceted good (Gillespie
2010). At one level, the platform is a quasi-technical catchall for an oper-
ating environment, carriage system or a piece of infrastructure. The Web
28 A. ATHIQUE

2.0 era dovetailed this usage with the parallel notion of an ‘advertising
platform’, where the platform serves as a vehicle for influence and profit.
The liberal notion of an ‘open platform’ softens the edges of this conver-
gence by invoking democratic connotations of meritocratic ambition, free
speech and equal competition (ibid.).
‘Technology companies’ have thus reliably deployed the metaphor of
the ‘open platform’ to defend themselves against responsibility for the
content and consequences of the digital services that they operate. In turn,
the critical response to the expanding concentration of platform power has
extended the metaphor as coinage of its own critique. As a proponent of
the recent analytical concept of ‘platform capitalism’, Nick Srnicek charac-
terizes the new affordances of ‘platform capitalism’ that that digital plat-
forms have brought into being. As he puts it:

Platforms, in sum, are a new sort of firm: they are characterized by providing
the infrastructure to mediate between different user groups, by displaying
monopoly tendencies driven by network effects, by employing cross-­
subsidisation to draw in different user groups and by having a designed core
architecture that that governs the interaction possibilities … all of these
characteristics make platforms key business models for extracting and con-
trolling data … they are an extractive apparatus for data. (Srnicek 2017: 48)

By this formulation, the technological metaphors (core architecture,

interaction possibilities) converge with capitalist tendencies (monopoly,
cross-subsidization) in order to multiply and monetize ‘network effects’.
The underlying goal is to enclose and maximize ‘data extraction’ from the
user base. As such, the platform inculcates novel logics predicated upon
the boosting of data-based discovery. Amidst the furore surrounding the
ethical wants of data mining and the tech-topic proposition of algorithmic
culture, it is certainly hard to avoid the extractive logics that now pervade
our digital experience (see Gago and Mezzadra 2017). With the expansion
of ‘platforms’ such as Google and Facebook, we have all become acutely
aware of the fact that platforms design and exercise their protocols in
order to harvest and analyse data (Fisher and Mehozay 2019). Whether
big or small, aggregators or niche, platforms engage in ‘alchemical pro-
cesses’ intended to realize surplus value from user data (Athique 2018).
This commodification of user data takes many forms, from traditional
‘market intelligence’ to behavioural interventions and the rejuvenated
numerology through which predictive analysis proffers computerized
 2 DIGITAL EMPORIUMS: EVOLUTIONARY PATHWAYS TO PLATFORM… 29

modes of divination (ibid.: 62). In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica

scandal, our attention has been further drawn to the commercial and
political imperatives under which platforms, state bodies and political
actors join hands in exchanging the benefits of these data ‘resources’. It
would be naïve to expect otherwise in India, and the role of digital plat-
form strategies in the 2014 and 2019 elections has not escaped the atten-
tion of political observers (Goel 2018; Rodrigues 2020).
The critical discourse on platforms piles up the metaphors, through
extensive combinations of business argot and Marxist terminology. That
is, ‘platforms’ constitute the primary apparatus for ‘mining’ the social
domain, acquiring and retaining multitudinous users in order to ‘accumu-
late’ quanta of data and realize value. This highly symbolized ‘value chain’
is taken by Srnicek to be the defining logic of ‘platform capitalism’ (2017:
48). Nonetheless, beyond the imperatives of accumulation, the ‘shop-
fronts’ of the various high-profile platforms ‘brands’ also work hard to
articulate distinctive service offerings. With these apparent affordances in
mind, Srnicek offers a basic typology of contemporary platforms, where he
identifies:

Advertising platforms … which extract information on users, undertake a

labour of analysis, and then use the products of that process to sell ad
space … Cloud platforms … which own the hardware and software of
digital-­dependent businesses and are renting them out … Industrial plat-
forms … which build the hardware and software necessary to transform
traditional manufacturing into internet-connected processes … Product
platforms … that generate revenue by using other platforms to turn a tradi-
tional good into a service and by collecting rent … Lean platforms … which
attempt to reduce their ownership of assets to a minimum and to profit by
reducing costs. (Srnicek 2017, pp. 49–50)

On the face of it (or rather, the screen), we could readily apply this
model to the Indian case, whereby: Google and the online editions of The
Hindu could both be categorized as ‘advertising platforms’, TataSky could
be positioned as a ‘cloud platform’, Infosys becomes a provider of ‘indus-
trial platforms’, e-commerce operations like FlipKart and digital film com-
panies such as UFO Moviez would all be ‘product platforms’, whereas
labour-outsourcing operations such as Ola (taxis) and OYO (hotels) can
be lumped together as ‘lean platforms’. This sorting seems neat enough,
being a typology based upon ‘what does the firm do?’. By taking this
30 A. ATHIQUE

approach, Srincek’s typology attempts to account both for different

sources of profits and for the different products and services platforms
offer to their users. In practice, however, this neatness is arbitrary, since
these various categories do not constitute any definite series. Consequently,
various platforms either operate across or simply fall into multiple catego-
ries and, equally critically, there is evidence to suggest that the various
platforms are functionally and, often, financially dependent upon each
other. That is, the market systems constituted within platform models are,
like all markets within a true economy, significantly dependent upon their
interaction with other markets (and thereby other platforms).
This interdependence between product markets, which Srnicek refers
to as ‘cross-subsidization’, is by no means particular to the digital econ-
omy. As with the ‘monopoly tendencies’ of communication, it has been a
distinctive feature of media markets for at least a century, in India as much
as elsewhere. Within this larger whole, platforms can only be partially
understood as ‘firms’, ‘brands’, ‘portals’ or ‘shopfront’ businesses. These
elements are primarily indicative of the ownership, functionality and retail
interface of platforms, which tend to differ in each case. The wider attempt
to institute platform ecosystems necessarily interacts with existing modali-
ties of social exchange. Alongside media platforms driven by content
(whether professionally or user-generated), the platform economy encom-
passes expanding infrastructure of digital finance, along with aggregating
informal markets for ‘services’ (such as drivers, guest houses, home secu-
rity and deliveries) as well as grey economies (such as second hand markets
and content piracy) (see Punathambekar and Mohan 2019). What we are
seeing first hand in social media platforms is the simultaneous processes
through which everyday interaction, sociability and democracy are being
integrated within this wider transactional architecture. Thus, the funda-
mental commonality between all digital platforms is their systematic for-
malization of peer-to-peer exchanges within a rules-based system.
Consequently, their primary characteristics are those of a marketplace,
not a firm.

Market Automata
Across the platform economy as a whole, we see some useful exemplars of
the increasing number of market exchanges being aggregated within por-
tals that allow value capture at the transactional level (through data, cer-
tainly, but more explicitly through commissions and subscriptions). One
 2 DIGITAL EMPORIUMS: EVOLUTIONARY PATHWAYS TO PLATFORM… 31

of these would be the commissions taken by the hotel booking platform

OYO, another would be the capacity to offer money storage in mobile
wallets to underpin banking services and micro-finance. E-commerce is,
by its very nature, a vast clearing house. These market offerings are attrac-
tive because of their capacity to furnish zero-level entry barriers to partici-
pants. As part of the bargain, platforms out-source transactional costs to
participants, enforce arbitrary terms and conditions and enclose buyers
and sellers within a proprietary system. At the operational level, the role of
a market ‘mediator’ of peer-to-peer exchanges (as opposed to an owner,
buyer or seller within the relevant market) allows for the ‘lean’ existence of
internet portals and their opportunistic location for tax purposes. The
programmatic and proprietary logics of these businesses suggest that,
somewhat unlike earlier media industries, the institutional logic of a plat-
form is not the organization of any productive process per se, but rather
the design and population of an automated market system.
Approaching platforms as a set of transactional markets rather than as
types of firms encourages some different thinking on ‘platform capitalism’.
Not least, it prompts us to reconsider the ‘stack’ of infrastructure as being,
simultaneously, a stack of markets and a stack of technologies (Bratton
2016). In each phase of development, it has been the commercial poten-
tials of the public internet that have been paramount to the extension of
the system, with each additional layer of functionality adding purposefully
to the impetus towards commodification. In the 1990s, value was extracted
from the communication layer, through the sale of hardware, software
subscriptions, data packs and other forms of access rents. In the 2000s,
additional value was being extracted from the distribution layer, through
content subscriptions, pay-per-view offerings, user-generated content and
the bulk of the world’s advertising revenues. In the 2010s, further value is
being extracted from various forms of piece work, user tracking, data min-
ing and the aggregation of commissions exercised over peer-to-peer
exchanges. This is the transactional layer where platform businesses oper-
ate. It is too narrow, therefore, to explicate platforms as simply data collec-
tion companies operating in the guise of service providers. There is a much
higher order of integration in play across these layers, where each platform
integrates multiple products in simultaneous transaction (Athique 2019c).
While platform logics should by no means be seen as an ‘outcome’ of the
so-called Web 2.0 era, it is at the present technical level that the mass indi-
viduation and interoperability of digital systems has allowed platforms to
32 A. ATHIQUE

realize opportunities for synchronizing large sets of marketplaces in

real time.
Platforms extract different forms of rent from online transactions
(whether this is social communication, peer-to-peer selling or labour
exchanges). As digital manifestations of certain ‘market ideals’, platforms
are designed to profit from ‘optimal pricing’ and to multiply ‘friction-free
capitalism’ amongst users who are simultaneously producers and consum-
ers (Gates 1995). They are protected from both buyers and sellers by vir-
tue of safe harbour clauses enshrined in (or, as in the Indian case, derived
from) the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. By such means, platforms
seek to locate themselves in the transactional layer of the digital economy,
not simply to benefit from a ‘lean’ operating model, but to avoid being
regulated as businesses within the markets they are seeking to encapsulate.
If Netflix is not a broadcaster, PayTM is not a bank, NaMo TV is not a
news channel and Amazon is not a retailer, they avoid any regulatory
norms save their own, thereby acquiring a sovereign advantage in the rel-
evant market. Platforms thus claim the right to operate as essentially priva-
tized markets, under a branded entity that sets its own regulatory norms.
As I indicated at the outset, this form of commercial extra-territoriality is
hardly unknown to India, nor is the consequent capacity of such players to
furnish multiple products and multi-sided markets. The arrival of the
Californian East India Companies has been coterminous with the evolu-
tion of similar entitles, both within India and across the Asian region (such
as Softbank, Alibaba and Reliance Jio).
Although these various ambitions for market monopoly seem clear
enough, we should be wary of schematizing another seemingly tidy struc-
tural form as an autonomous reality. In practice, the real analytical benefit
of a markets-based approach is that it allows us to uncover a great deal of
untidiness in India’s platform economy. At present, there are around
150 million regular users of broadband in India, which is only 13% of the
population, and even this level of access is typically intermittent and unsta-
ble. The infrastructural layer is fundamentally uneven in terms of cover-
age, capacity and access (between metro and rural, between West and
East, between rich neighbourhoods and poor ones). Even for the one
sixth of the population that has regular access, irregular electricity sup-
plies, lack of fixed connections and the limitations of mobile spectrum all
serve to ensure an intermittent digital environment (Thomas 2012).
Deficiencies in power and speed impede platforms that distribute digital
goods, whereas for platforms that seek to facilitate materialized markets,
 2 DIGITAL EMPORIUMS: EVOLUTIONARY PATHWAYS TO PLATFORM… 33

additional infrastructural lacks come into play, not least in road transport.
In India, e-commerce operators have been forced to invest in their own
distribution infrastructure and to employ a vast host of couriers for deliv-
ery. With only half of the population captured within the banking system,
and the majority still preferring to avoid debit cards, India’s e-commerce
operations are forced to handle a lot of cash, thereby increasing the cost
and complexity of their operations. The attempt to overcome this barrier,
and to supercharge the platform economy, through the ‘surgical strike’ of
demonetization was an economic debacle which demonstrated the dan-
gers of trying to constitute a platform economy by fiat, without due regard
for material constraints (see Reddy 2017).
For any realist, India’s distribution layer clearly suffers from geographi-
cal, temporal and monetary bottlenecks that should logically impede the
expansion of the online market. Nonetheless, India’s platform economy
continues to expand in the face of such obstacles precisely because labour
is incredibly cheap. It is nearly always cheaper than any reliable form of
automation. In India, platforms can rely on a labour surplus to ‘absorb’
infrastructure bottlenecks. This fact alone undermines a central rationale
for platform economies in the industrialized world (as per Srnicek and
Williams 2016; Ford 2016). Thus, in the Indian context, the major oppor-
tunities for platforms lie not in outsourcing labour costs, but in capturing
large sectors of economic activity that previously operated in the informal
economy. Guest houses, street food, rickshaws, drivers and guards—these
are all largely disaggregated cash-based sectors. Their aggregation within
platforms constitutes a private sector ‘mechanism of legibility’, intent
upon simultaneously formalizing these markets and bringing them with
the ambit of transactional records (Maurer 2012). In this respect, the rent
capture of informal markets echoes the recession economics of ‘the devel-
oped world, where the implicit reliance of platforms on a social surplus
that absorbs production costs is euphemized by the utopian deceit of a
‘sharing economy’ (as per Sundararajan 2016). In India, however, this sec-
tor is far larger and constitutes central rather than surplus capacity (see Rai
2019). In a country where low prices and subsistence wages have always
been normative, the transactional costs of the digital must be borne by the
petty traders that constitute the majority of the lower middle classes. For
the platform operators, far smaller profit margins are offset by the sheer
numbers involved. It is evident, then, that aggregation of population, not
capital, is the guiding principle of platform economy.
34 A. ATHIQUE

Evolutionary Processes
The evolution of ‘the stack’, as a conjoint commercial and technological
apparatus, is one obvious genealogy of the platform economy. It is hardly
surprising, therefore, that this pathway dominates our discussion of digital
capitalism (see McAfee and Brynjolfsson 2017; McChesney 2013).
Without doubt, we must account for the ways in which platforms and
novel ‘technology banks’ operate as capital interests in the transactional
layer of the platform economy. However, it may be equally critical to
understand their institutional function, which is market integration. With
their penchant for ‘nudging’ their users, the ethos and ethics of platforms
have emerged from pathways laid down by the marketing profession that
guided consumption in the latter half of the twentieth century. Similarly,
as Ramon Lobato observes, we still have to consider a player like Netflix
not only within the overarching ecology of platforms but also within the
longue durée of the business and usages of television (Lobato 2019).
Rather than reading ‘affordances’ off the screen, we need to ‘restore inten-
tion’ to our understanding of the seemingly inexorable technological and
financial trajectories within the platform economy (as per Williams 1974).
At this point, then, I will attempt to canvas four critical evolutionary path-
ways that have determined the evolution of platforms: media convergence
(between interpersonal and social communication), guided consumption
(via market information and audience manipulation), conglomeration
(driven by logistical interoperability) and market automation (via the
equivalence of data and money exchange).
From the perspective of user experience, the most obvious evolutionary
process is that of convergence between the domains of interpersonal,
logistical and social communication. These domains were long separated
by a division of functions enforced by state regulation, thereby guarantee-
ing neutral logistical functions in the commercial domain and a degree of
horizontal (if not vertical) privacy in the domains of personal communica-
tion. The convergence of these different usages of media within personal-
ized media devices, along with the wholesale transfer of network operations
to the private sector, led unquestionably to a new sensory environment
where the flows of personal, political and commercial information became
inextricably mingled. It is the consequences of this process that has driven
the popularity of platforms like WhatsApp in India, along with their tragic
interaction with village vigilantism, fake news and electoral politics across
the breadth of the country. The converged flows and cellular architecture
 2 DIGITAL EMPORIUMS: EVOLUTIONARY PATHWAYS TO PLATFORM… 35

of such platforms has invigorated the multitude of vernacular public

spheres in rural India, bringing these previously informal domains into the
digital domain. As much as this has been an exemplar for micro-profits in
the developing world, it hasn’t been a pretty sight, prompting both
WhatsApp and the Government of India to disavow responsibility for the
consequences of platform architectures in the hinterlands (Sundaram 2017).
The evolving role of the audience in an interactive media apparatus is
another critical evolutionary pathway of the platform economy. It has long
been recognized that the goods and services, assets and values operative
across media processes are necessarily different from the nineteenth-­
century model of extraction, labour, manufacture and sale that has domi-
nated our understanding of ‘industries’ (see Lash and Urry 1994). Media
producers must garner audiences for what are largely experiential products
(whether there content is expressive or informative in intent). Thus, the
production of audiences is always a persuasive process. In turn, the genera-
tion of audience mass provides the basis for communication systems to
facilitate wider process of persuasion. As Dallas Smythe noted long ago,
media producers are implicated not only in the production of their own
advertisement but also in the sale of the audience commodity itself (Smythe
1977). Media industries therefore played a central role in the wider proj-
ect of ‘guided consumption’ that was taken up as an alternative to ‘planned
production’ in the mass economies of the twentieth century. As a conse-
quence, they were able to generate not only a market for influence but also
a wealth of market information about consumers which, in turn, gener-
ated its own customers (Lazarsfeld 1941). In an era of individual address-
ability, platforms converge these functions within a single automated
process. Thus, while platforms may seek to fashion an enclosed market-
place (a ‘one-stop shop’) via their ‘user experience’, on the server side they
operate multi-sided markets for numerous clients for market information
and social data.
The primacy of user data in the platform economy runs in parallel with
the longer term evolution of economic planning. In the Indian context,
this process is often seen as being marked by the institution of the plan-
ning commission in 1950, followed by the rupture of ‘liberalization’ in
1991 and the turn away from industrial planning and towards a consumer-­
led economy. The major distinction between planning and guiding, often
confused with ideological trappings, is simply between producing what
people need and giving people what they want. Since both require media-
tion, this tends in practice to devolve to a choice between giving people
36 A. ATHIQUE

what they are told that they need (say, Aadhaar) and giving people what
they are told to want (say, Amazon). Both are top-down processes and this
is why media platforms like YouTube have been associated with a novel
liberation of media content production from the hands of media corpora-
tions to the putative benefit of small producers and the general public
(notably by Burgess and Green 2009; Cunningham and Craig 2016).
However, it is highly significant in the Indian case that there were scarcely
any such media corporations twenty years ago. In fact, there has, over the
‘liberalization’ period, been a clear evolution towards conglomeration via
the application of digital technologies (Booth 2017). The Indian media
economy over the past twenty years has seen private capital taking over the
communication domains of the state and subsequently ‘formalizing’ previ-
ously disorganized sectors of media business, before moving on to ‘plat-
formize’ other markets for goods and services. In part, the concentration
of platform power has occurred because the shift to the digital has come
with extremely high infrastructure costs, which only a handful of private
interests can bear, and in part because the internal logics of a platform
ecology necessitate a high degree of interoperability and mobility across
platforms.
Another important point of distinction in the Indian case is that all
three layers of the platform economy are being built simultaneously and,
in the most part, under-written by the same actors. Consequently, the
interests of platform businesses are effectively attuned to the interests of
India’s telecoms networks, which is primarily in driving network expan-
sion and increasing data traffic. Similarly, it is not by chance that financial
entities are major investors in the platform sector. The guiding ethos of
FinTech is to ensure that every peer-to-peer transaction generates a com-
mission or deposit. Whereas early proponents of digital technologies
emphasized their potentials for reducing transaction costs, the era of plat-
forms has deliberately inverted this logic, precisely because platform busi-
nesses make their money on each transaction. This fosters a novel
equivalence between airtime, user data, commissions and digital finance in
the platform economy, and thereby signifies the financialization of the
social domain on a vast scale (see Maurer 2015). Fundamentally, the pri-
mary motivation of platforms as aggregators of peer-to-peer exchanges is
to enhance and widen the number, depth and range of transactions in play.
In that respect, the conceptual evolution of computerized markets from
the 1970s onwards, implemented incrementally from the bourses in the
1980s down to previously informal sectors in the 2010s is a neglected, but
 2 DIGITAL EMPORIUMS: EVOLUTIONARY PATHWAYS TO PLATFORM… 37

obviously central, evolutionary pathway. One apparent consequence of

these four converging genealogies is that the major interests behind the
platform economy are relatively content agnostic. They do not particularly
care if the data being circulated is Aamir Khan, Comicstaan, fascist memes
or video calls from a particularly intrusive aunty as long as transactions of
time, data and money are being captured.

Bundling India
From the nineteenth-century bazaar to the twentieth-century emporium
and the twenty-first-century platform, India has inspired the sovereign
ambitions of companies seeking to diversify their products, build their
own transport systems, mint their own coin, write their own laws, collect
their own taxes and determine the rights of producers and consumers. The
unavoidable example in the Indian context is not Mark Zuckerberg’s
Facebook, but India’s Reliance. The ever-expanding integration of goods
and services under the Reliance flag certainly seems redolent of the impe-
rial commerce of the nineteenth century. Diversification over a thirty-year
period from textiles into oil refining, power generation, financial services,
telecoms, media and entertainment, grocery stores and mobile apps and
banking has created a multi-product retail space of astounding propor-
tions. In 2015, it was Mukesh Amabani who orchestrated vast levels of
investment by Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) into upgrading India’s
digital infrastructure, some $42 billion according to Rahul Mukherjee
(2019: 176). This was accompanied by the launch of Reliance Jio, which
provided mobile subscribers with free call plans and data plans far below
market costs (Curwen 2018). The vast loss-leader of free Jio services and
its cheap handsets have captured hundreds of millions of users, thereby
creating the user base for a raft of Jio platform services, including JioMoney,
JioChat and JioTV (ibid.: 177). Within the space of two years, Reliance
Jio has been able to integrate what Rahul Mukherjee calls the ‘pipes and
platforms’ of Digital India, easily securing its ambition to become the
provider of 5G networks in India (2019).
The Reliance brand now encloses goods, services and markets across
the breadth of India, allowing for the aggregation of economic, social and
political transactions across all major sectors of the economy, including
defence. This sweeping set of interests underpins Reliance’s emergence as
a ‘national champion’ and provides the heft for its working partnerships
with transnational capital, expressed in its recently announced alliance
38 A. ATHIQUE

with Microsoft and the aim of becoming ‘India’s Huwei’. Despite protes-
tations from competitors and regulators, including the Comptroller and
Auditor General (CAG), this vast acquisition of market power has been
actively supported by the Government of India, for whom the partner-
ships inherent in realizing the infrastructure of Digital India are far more
important than the norms of market regulation. The unique capacity of
Reliance to operate at scale at the All-India level makes it a natural partner
for developing India’s platform economy. From powering homes and
vehicles to laying down fibre networks, Reliance now occupies a central
position around which transport, entertainment and service economies
are being reorganized, with its financial infrastructure capable of servicing
venture capital markets as well as everyday mobile payments on its
JioMoney platform. In all these undertakings, RIL is closely aligned with
the current Government of India’s technologically inspired vision of re-­
shaping the citizenry. From its trademark skyscraper in South Bombay,
Reliance thus has a reasonable claim to the status of a modern-day East
India Company, a vast conglomerate easily capable of competing with its
international counterparts in their attempts to dominate the markets of a
Digital India.
Nonetheless, the notion of platform capitalism may not quite capture
the full extent of the ‘great integration’ envisioned through the platform
economy model. Such an undertaking requires the market logics of con-
tent, of carriage, of service, of labour, of airtime, of user input, of data
assets, of convenience, of surveillance, of gratification, of energy and of
sociability to become effectively synchronized. This implies there has to be
more to platform economies than ‘capitalism’ alone. Indeed, these market
systems may not be capitalist in the modern sense, since the means of par-
ticipation (i.e. ownership of the market) is far more central than ownership
of the means of production (per se) or profit from outputs (as long as suf-
ficient volumes of transactions are being captured). At the very least, since
they rely heavily on the simultaneous operation of reciprocity and redistri-
bution across each network of exchange, my sense is that platforms which
transact social economies cannot be solely capitalist. India’s extensive
familial economics remain laden with reciprocal exchanges across all socio-­
economic classes, and Reliance is no exception to this general rule. Thus,
while we could simply consider Reliance as a ‘firm’ working across Srnicek’s
typology and beyond, it is in a larger sense part of an historically recurring
pursuit of paramountcy over India’s market systems. Standing against such
ambitions, both domestic and international, is always the questions of
 2 DIGITAL EMPORIUMS: EVOLUTIONARY PATHWAYS TO PLATFORM… 39

what the market will bear, what these vast ambitions will cost and what the
polity will succumb to (i.e. aside from free data). Certainly, mediation is
more central to day-to-day social and economic processes than ever before,
but it becomes increasingly hard to discern anything we could call a media
industry as such. If Reliance Jio is producing music and television content
primarily to lock customers into its retail, telecoms and data ecosystem,
can it be adequately understood as a media firm? Given the scale of its
operations, perhaps it might be better considered as an economy in and of
itself. That is, as an emporium.

Acknowledgement An earlier version of this chapter was published previously as

‘Digital Emporiums: Platform Capitalism in India’ in Media Industries Journal,
6(2), 2019. I would like to thank the journal reviewers and editors for their com-
ments on the draft copy.

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 CHAPTER 3

The Networked Media Economy

and the Indian Gilded Age

Scott Fitzgerald

The rapid and conspicuous growth of the networked media economy in

India, comprising of network infrastructure, content industries and online
media, has been boosted over the last decade by the rapid digitisation of
production, distribution and consumption. This development has aligned
the increasingly networked media economy with the broader vector of
‘platform economics’, in which maximum data extraction is key. Arguments
about how this data should be controlled, and more specifically concerns
about the regulation of so-called cross-border data flows, have been
expressed through different analogies. Mukesh Ambani, chairman, man-
aging director and largest shareholder of Reliance Industries Limited
(RIL), has recently argued that

India’s data must be controlled and owned by Indian people—and not by

corporates, especially global corporations. For India to succeed in this data-­
driven revolution, we will have to migrate the control and ownership of

S. Fitzgerald (*)
Curtin University, Bentley, WA, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 43

A. Athique, V. Parthasarathi (eds.), Platform Capitalism in India,
Global Transformations in Media and Communication Research - A
Palgrave and IAMCR Series,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44563-8_3
44 S. FITZGERALD

Indian data back to India—in other words, Indian wealth back to every
Indian … we have to collectively launch a new movement against data colo-
nisation. In this new world, data is the new oil. And data is the new wealth.
(Economic Times 2019)

In response, Facebook’s Vice-President for Global Affairs and

Communications, Sir Nick Clegg, sought to challenge this view by saying:

There are many in India and around the world who regard data as the new
oil—and that, like oil, having a great reserve of it held within your national
boundaries, will lead to sure-fire prosperity. But this analogy is mistaken….
Data isn’t oil—a finite commodity to be owned and traded … a better liquid
to liken it to is water, with the global Internet like a great border-less ocean
of currents and tides. (The Telegraph 2019)

These contrasting perspectives underscore Athique’s earlier observa-

tion that, rather than control over content and message, the geopolitics of
information in the digital era are primarily centred upon control over the
data infrastructure and data harvest (2016, p. 53; see also Schiller 2014).
Thus, in its Digital Economy Report 2019, the UN Conference on Trade
and Development (UNCTAD) notes: “while it is important that data be
allowed to flow easily in order to harness the benefits of the digital econ-
omy, it is equally important to ensure that the associated gains are shared
in a fair manner by the actors and countries involved in the value creation
process” (UNCTAD 2019, p. 92). Despite the exponential growth of data
production and use, UNCTAD observes that developing countries con-
front the “increasing dominance of global digital platforms and their con-
trol of data, as well as their capacity to create and capture the ensuing
value” (ibid.). UNCTAD highlights the dominance of seven ‘super plat-
forms’: Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Tencent and
Alibaba. The UN body therefore calls for national development strategies
to “enhance domestic capacities to ‘refine’ the data” and ensure that local
firms can upgrade their position within data value chains so as to avoid the
“emergence of a new kind of international dependency pattern, with
developing countries having to rely mainly on global digital platforms
based in the United States or China” (UNCTAD 2019, p. 99).
The UNCTAD report focuses primarily upon inequalities and power
imbalances confronting developing countries. Yet, the expansion of the
networked media economy in India over the last two decades has taken
 3 THE NETWORKED MEDIA ECONOMY AND THE INDIAN GILDED AGE 45

place within a domestic economy that has seen inequality deepen dramati-
cally. Wealth held by India’s billionaires increased by almost ten times over
the last decade, including an astounding leap of 36% in 2017 (the year
following the surprise demonetisation of India’s cash economy). This wid-
ening gap has fostered claims that we are witnessing an ‘Indian Gilded
Age’ (Oxfam India 2018; Chancel and Piketty 2017). Given Mukesh
Ambani’s status as (by far) India’s wealthiest individual, his claim that a
countermovement against ‘data colonisation’ from large US-based firms
will return the “control and ownership of Indian data and wealth back to
every Indian” should compel some critical questions about the line
between public good and private wealth when it comes to assessing the
strategic imperatives of India’s home-grown digital platforms and technol-
ogy companies.
In taking up this enquiry, this chapter is divided into five major points
of discussion. Firstly, the notion of an ‘Indian Gilded Age’, premised on
the proportional wealth and influence of Indian billionaires, is discussed
with reference to the historical relationship between the state and capital
in India. Secondly, given debates over new forms of economic dependency
arising from the power of digital platforms, a Braudelian model of global
capitalism is explored in the context of the networked media economy.
The third point of discussion examines the consolidation of India’s domes-
tic telecommunications and communications conglomerates, which
increasingly influence the operations of the far smaller cultural and media
industries. The fourth point of discussion is the financialisation of the net-
worked media economy and distinctive characteristics of capital interests
in the Indian context. This naturally segues into the fifth point, which
returns to the role of the state as the regulator and champion of capital in
the platform economy. The chapter concludes by questioning the limita-
tions of a world systems approach, which can be, and often is, marshalled
to support the interests of dominant nationally based companies.

The Rise of Indian Billionaires and the Gilded Age

For the past decade, academics, politicians and commentators have sug-
gested that Indian capitalism is beginning to resemble the ‘Gilded Age’ in
the United States (e.g. Sinha and Varshney 2011; Gandhi and Walton
2012). A comparison with late-nineteenth-century American ‘robber bar-
ons’ has emerged in response to the rapid expansion of a cohort of Indian
billionaires (exemplified by figures such as such as Mukesh Ambani,
46 S. FITZGERALD

Gautam Adani and Lakshmi Mittal). A number of measures further

encourage the comparison between contemporary India and America’s
Gilded Age. First of all, the wealth of India’s billionaire’s as a percentage
of GDP is seen as unusually high for a relatively poor country (Crabtree
2018). Secondly, they are also numerous, with the number of Indian bil-
lionaires estimated between 106 and 118 in 2018, ranking India third
globally behind China and the United States (UBS/PwC 2017). Thirdly,
following the pattern set by the American robber barons, Walton suggests
that over half of the wealth accrued by India’s billionaires between 1996
and 2013 comes from what he describes as ‘rent-thick’ sectors (sectors
with high levels of extractive rents derived from links to the state) (2017).
Rather than productivity-enhancing Schumpeterian rents, these actors
appear to achieve returns well above those of ‘fully competitive markets’,
assumedly via political patronage, preferential access to state-controlled
resources and monopolistic market power. Consequently, Walton uses the
same methodology as The Economist’s list of ‘crony-capitalism’ industries
(The Economist 2014).
This dynamic in the Indian economy reflects, in part, the enduring
remnants of the state-capitalism and licensing regime pursued after 1947
as a ‘unique Indian business model’ (Khatri and Ojha 2016; Varma et al.
2016). In this model, a core business competence was establishing rela-
tionships of patronage and mutual support with politicians and state
bureaucrats as a means of gaining access to resources (Gupta 2017). While
the size of corporations and the power of the capitalist class in India has
clearly grown in the wake of economic liberalisation since the 1990s, cli-
entelism, cronyism and corruption still permeate India’s state-capital rela-
tionships. Crabtree observes that during the liberalisation period: “public
resources were being gifted to industrialists in increasingly vast quanti-
ties … allowing them to rake in outsized and undeserved profits” (2018,
p. 63). Rather than being wound back, as Chandra points out, state
patronage relations expanded into new areas of the economy through the
creation of new regulations, control of access to previously reserved sec-
tors of inputs such as credit, coal or 2G spectrum allocation (2015).
As Walton notes, while the American Gilded Age was characterised by
a lack of regulations, the so-called Indian Gilded Age has unfolded in a
space of extensive legal and regulatory capacity, albeit one characterised by
weak and/or accommodating regulatory practice (2017). Indian civil ser-
vants and governments retain “considerable discretionary power over
 3 THE NETWORKED MEDIA ECONOMY AND THE INDIAN GILDED AGE 47

various aspects of the policy process” that shape and codify state-capital
relationships (Murali 2019, p.47). While the enforcement of laws covering
corrupt corporate activities have often been weak or absent, Chandra has
argued that patronage relations, which “exploit and expand the discretion
available within the law, rather than breaking it outright” are becoming
more common (2015, p. 47). Thus, while patronage “certainly provide
ample opportunities for rent-seeking on both sides, state officials may also
be motivated by business-friendly notions of ‘development’, and business
owners may also cultivate relationships with state officials as a necessary
evil to get work done in an ambiguous environment” (ibid.). This gives
rise to what could be seen as another key aspect of an ‘Indian business
model’, a response to what Sinha argues is the Janus-faced nature of the
Indian state, which pursues both development and patronage, a situation
that “allows business actors to infiltrate multiple arenas and access points
across institutions of democracy, public institutions, and regulatory bod-
ies” (2019, p. 51).
As well as being India’s largest and most profitable firm, Reliance
Industries Limited (RIL) is commonly, as Caussat notes, “portrayed as the
quintessential crony capitalism group in India” (2017, p. 210). Echoing
Walton’s point about the preponderate role of extractive rents rather than
innovation in the development of Indian corporations, Mazumdar remarks
that Reliance’s

movement to the top of the corporate hierarchy in India … was based on so

little of what could be considered as expressions of industrial entrepreneur-
ship. The only two related elements that can be identified as the key to sepa-
rating Reliance from others … were its exceptional success in gaining from
the regulatory regime and in mobilizing financing. (2017, p. 20)

Having achieved unmatched cash flows from vertical integration in

polyester textiles, petrochemicals and petroleum, Reliance moved in the
early 2000s “to grab … a ‘once in a lifetime opportunity’ to lay down and
own the knowledge economy’s equivalent of the railway and thus become
the ‘carrier’s carrier’” for India’s digital economy (McDonald 2010,
p. 303). The import of Reliance’s larger investment strategy became evi-
dent in late 2015, when its subsidiary, Reliance Jio, entered into the
mobile telecom market via a loss-leading provision of mobile data. This
prompted substantial industry consolidation, as smaller firms rapidly
48 S. FITZGERALD

exited or merged with other firms, with Reliance Jio quickly emerging as
the third largest telecoms operator. As the largest Indian firm by revenue,
market capitalisation and profit, across all economic sectors, it is necessary
to underline the relative size of RIL compared to its competitors in the
networked media economy. RIL has been able invested more than
US$30 billion in digital infrastructure, “the most expensive new venture
of its kind by any global company” (Mundy 2019). Over the past decade,
the centre of gravity in the media and entertainment sector in India has
moved inexorably towards sectors where online provision, data use and
data extraction are most pronounced. By 2021, online media is expected
to overtake print as the second largest media segment, behind television
(FICCI-E&Y 2019). This development has propelled Reliance further
into the sector through its existing interests in film and radio and through
now ventures in OTT video and streaming music services (see
Fitzgerald 2019).
Reliance, like other telecom service providers (TSPs), bundles digital
content services with data plans to gain a competitive edge and boost the
volume, collection and sale of data. FICCI-E&Y suggests that Indian
TSPs paid between INR 3.5 and 4 billion (US$49–56 million) in 2018
for content syndication rights, a figure predicted to reach INR 8–10 bil-
lion (US$112–140 million) by 2021 when a predicted 375 million sub-
scribers will be accessing bundled content (2019, pp. 120, 127). The
development of India’s networked media economy has also been marked
by the growing presence of the seven global ‘super platforms’ identified
by UNCTAD (2019). Critical analyses of global platform corporations
have equated their operational ethos with the privileges of gilded age
capitalism (Zuboff 2019; Wu 2018). In the Indian context, these plat-
forms and their domestic competitors have been making comparable
demands for self-­regulation, based on either the ‘evolutionary laws of
business’ or ‘network effects’. Essentially, these are strategic attempts to
limit the encroachment of democracy on their business operations by
developing partnerships with state institutions. Growing fears of a form
of international digital dependency in India, as exemplified by the
UNCTAD report, has opened a new chapter in the dynamic between
patronage and development in capital-­state relations: one, as we will see,
that favours the further rise of Reliance.
 3 THE NETWORKED MEDIA ECONOMY AND THE INDIAN GILDED AGE 49

Braudelian Approaches to Media

and Cultural Industries

Given that the rise of global digital platforms is apparently linked with the
emergence of a super-wealthy strata and new forms of international depen-
dency, some scholars have drawn upon the work of Fernand Braudel,
whose account of the changing structure of capitalism can be applied to
recent developments in the networked media economy. Bouquillion, in
particular, argues that the subsumption of communication and culture
industries into the capitalist realm has been deepened by processes of digi-
talisation and platformisation in the twenty-first century (2007, 2008).
Bouquillion draws on Braudel in order to refute the model of a naturally
competitive market, since it fails to explain the development pathways of
the networked media economy. For his part, Braudel regarded the com-
petitive market model as only ever being an ideal type, premised upon the
interaction of a great number of actors via the mechanisms of supply and
demand (i.e. a self-balancing market based on exchange between ‘price-­
takers’). Braudel’s contrasting description of capitalism considered its
operations to be inherently non-competitive in a manner which made
capitalism categorically distinct from the market economy.
Braudel’s influence has been strongest in the body of work known as
World-Systems theory, but is also clearly evident in Armand Mattelart’s
work on dependency and communication (Mattelart 1978, 1994). More
recently, Sousa has used Braudelian notions of time to discuss social change
and new information and communication technologies (2006). It is the
interpretation of Braudel’s model of capitalism developed by world-­
systems theory that Bouquillion emphasises (as per Wallerstein 1991).
Here there is preponderance to understanding the world economic system
in terms of dependency upon elite, and largely Western, capital interests.
In communications research this approach has often been adopted in par-
allel with notions of cultural dependency imposed upon the developing
worlds by Western media systems. Outside of communications research,
Giovanni Arrighi emerged as probably the leading advocate of a Braudelian
legacy in political economy (1994, 2001, 2007). Arrighi identified three
claims that he considers central to Braudel’s contribution to our under-
standing of historical capitalism:
50 S. FITZGERALD

The first is that the essential feature of historical capitalism over its longue
durée, that is, over its entire lifetime, has been its “flexibility” and “eclecti-
cism” rather than the concrete forms it assumed at different places and at
different times. The second claim is that, world-historically, the financial
rather than the commercial or industrial arenas has been the real home of
capitalism. And the third is that the identification with states rather than
markets is what has enabled capitalism to triumph in the modern era.
(2001, p. 111)

It is Braudel’s basic conception of the evolving operations of capitalism

within a stratified global economy that unites the arguments of Arrighi
and Bouquillion. It also clearly resonates with the three-tier model of
India media markets posited recently by Parthasarathi and Athique (2019).
According to Braudel’s conception, capitalism occupies the top layer of a
three-tiered structure, differentiated on the basis of a ‘hierarchy of
exchanges’ (Braudel 1977, 1982). Thus, we have three relatively distinct
‘spheres of circulation’ guided by their own socio-temporal logics: the
non-economy of material life, the market economy and the sphere of capi-
talism. The age-old routines and rituals of material life form the base of
the two other tiers. Yet, for Braudel, this vast lower layer of material exis-
tence largely remains outside the formal logics of economic exchange
(1982, p. 21). It is the manner in which these logics play out in the upper
two tiers that marks the distinction between the market economy and
capitalism. As Arrighi summarises:

In Braudel’s conception, capitalism is ‘the top layer’ of the world of trade. It

consists of those individuals, networks, and organizations that systematically
appropriate the largest profits, regardless of the particular nature of the
activities (financial, commercial, industrial, or agricultural) in which they are
involved. Braudel distinguishes this layer from the lower layer of ‘market
economy’, which consists of participants in buying and selling activities
whose rewards are more or less proportionate to the costs and risks.
(2007, p. 267)

Braudel juxtaposes the market economy (where the ‘wheels of com-

merce’ are greased by “equal terms between traders (pure, perfect compe-
tition), transparency, symmetry of information”) with the intentionally
opaque zone of capitalism (where regularity and transparency are absent
and risk, and hence speculation, predominates) (Boltanski and Chiapelle
 3 THE NETWORKED MEDIA ECONOMY AND THE INDIAN GILDED AGE 51

2005, p. 5). In Braudel’s terminology, capitalism constitutes contre-­

marchés or anti-markets (1982). Political power is the crucial mechanism
in Braudelian capitalism, because it allows capitalists to operate above the
market economy. Braudel equates the sphere of capitalism with “giant
corporations, big business, buccaneering raids, boardroom knavery, and
other practices and institutions made possible by monopoly power”
(Haskell and Teichgraeber 1996, p. 16). According to Braudel, capitalism
is a world, or rather worlds (économie monde), of monopolies (see Taylor
2000). At this level, commands replace price as the main mechanism of
coordinating economic activity. The power configurations within anti-
markets give each monopoly a unique logic. This is why identification with
states is central to the success of capitalists, since state support is typically
a critical element of anti-market power. The businesses of media are also
particularly suited to generating anti-market power, which bestows media
corporations with substantial economic and political leverage.
Bouquillion argues that existing and emerging factors have combined
to move media industries away from any semblance of operating according
to the ideal type of the competitive market (2007, pp. 175–176).
Fundamentally, there appears to be a basic incompatibility between the
socio-economic specificities of the networked media economy and the ide-
alised movements of the competitive market advocated by orthodox eco-
nomics. Bouquillion is not alone in making this point. Bouquillion argues
that Braudel’s model of capitalism accords with the three broad features of
today’s networked media economy. First, changes in the industrial struc-
tures of these industries associated with financialisation and concentration.
These changes underwrite corporate internationalisation and, in turn,
militate against competition through their incorporation within what
Amin has referred to as ‘oligopoly-finance capitalism’ (2008). Second,
changes in the commodities produced by networked media economy
firms, in particular because of the introduction of new methods of financ-
ing and monetising the production and distribution of content. Third, the
re-working of media regulation and wider competition policies through
processes of liberalisation, which began in advanced capitalist nation states,
has unleashed the forces of capitalism rather than encouraged market
imperatives. In this context, state authorities endeavour to legitimatise and
facilitate the incorporation of the networked media economy within an
anti-market domain.
52 S. FITZGERALD

Consolidation in India’s Network Media Economy

Bhattacharjee and Agrawal track the emerging oligopolistic nature of the
Indian media sector from 2004–2011, noting even at this stage the grow-
ing size and influence of Reliance and Sun Networks in the telecommuni-
cations sector (2018). Their analysis has limitations, however, because it
does not fully address the central implication: that distribution operates as
“the key locus of power and profit” in media economies (Garnham 2000,
pp. 161–162). As power aggregates vertically within a network media
economy, we can see some forms of competition decrease. Thus: “Content
providers, while not small, are significantly more competitive, and are fac-
ing a less competitive provider market in the essential service of distribu-
tion. This imbalance leads to rent extraction by the less competitive
segment” (Noam 2016, p. 1345). As is already evident in three crucial
areas of distribution in the Indian media network economy (TV distribu-
tion, mobile telephony and broadband internet), this is a capital intensive
segment of the value chain that tends towards concentration and reduced
competition. In turn, control over distribution presents opportunities for
creating bottlenecks and reinforcing market power (see Fitzgerald 2015).
As Evans and Donders have noted, the ability to bundle broadband, voice
and subscription television offers network operators “significant advan-
tage vis-à-vis satellite operators and streaming platforms” (2018, p. 32).
They operate as the internet’s gatekeepers, dictate the terms of access and
means to connect to consumers. In an era of broadband network infra-
structure, network owners “virtually control the new distribution channel
of the new television industry and have bottleneck power” (ibid., p. 72).
The consolidation of telecommunications is probably the most critical
area where a battle for market power has been fought over the past two
decades. A policy shift in 2001 removed the state monopoly over the tele-
communications sector, attracting both foreign direct investment and a
host of private operators interested in developing India’s mobile telecoms
market (Mukherji 2008). By 2010, competition between 15 major players
drove the expansion of coverage and the reduction of charges and tariffs,
making India the world’s second-largest telecom market. In the same year,
Mukesh Ambani’s RIL emerged as the only successful bidder for pan-­
Indian 4G wireless spectrum (it achieved this by acquiring the broadband
services provider Infotel Broadband Services Limited immediately after its
successful bid) (Pendakur 2013). Mukherjee posits that Reliance was then
able to use regulatory loopholes to corner the 4G market, in part because
 3 THE NETWORKED MEDIA ECONOMY AND THE INDIAN GILDED AGE 53

state agencies “deliberately” allowed Reliance “to untie regulatory knots

because that was the best policy to guarantee the spread of Indian telecom
revolution” (2019, p. 182).
Using a 2013 license conversion process for converting internet service
providers into full service operators, Reliance launched its Reliance Jio
subsidiary in 2015 and, in 2016, instigated a price war that forced com-
petitors to match Jio’s loss-making deals on data, causing a rapid decline
in revenues and substantial industry consolidation (Thakurta and Ghatak
2016). Jio thereby emerged as the third largest operator with 340 million
subscribers. Smaller firms merged with other firms or exited (TTSL,
Telenor, MTS). Ironically, Reliance Communications (RComm) owned
by Mukesh Ambani’s brother Anil, previously the second-largest TSP in
2010, was forced into bankruptcy. In 2018, the Indian state regulators
approved the purchase of the third-biggest TSP, Idea, by the largest player,
Vodafone, in a deal that gave Vodafone a majority stake (45.1%) in the
combined entity with the Aditya Birla Group holding a 26% stake. By the
end of 2019, Jio had become the second-largest operator and is currently
only 50 million subscribers behind Vodafone (Fitch Solutions Group 2019).
A similar trajectory has been seen in television, where the Cable
Television Networks (Regulation) Amendment Bill 2011 prompted con-
solidation of the cable and satellite segments of India’s network infrastruc-
ture. High capital expenditure requirements on set-top boxes and back-end
infrastructure came at a time when broadcasters were facing new competi-
tion from over-the-top platforms made possible by cheaper internet rates
and subsidised through bundled service packages offered by the major
telecom operators, Vodafone, Airtel and Reliance Jio. Subsequently, the
number of direct-to-home (DTH) platforms has reduced from 7 to 5. In
2017, the Essel Group (owner of Zee Entertainment and Dish TV)
acquired a controlling stake in the satellite firm Videocon D2H in order
to consolidate its position through acquisitions of regional MSOs. But, by
2019, mounting debt pressures compelled Essel to combine its satellite
operations with Airtel Digital. The deal between Airtel and Dish TV can
also be seen as a response to the continuing expansion of Reliance Jio
(Laghate 2018). In October 2018, Reliance acquired controlling stakes in
India’s two largest cable TV and broadband companies (a 51.3% stake in
Hathway Cable & Datacom and a 66% stake in DEN Networks).
These acquisitions were part of Reliance’s larger goal to create a
fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) broadband service called JioGigaFiber
­
(Ramachandran 2018; Pandey 2019a). After the acquisitions of Hathway
54 S. FITZGERALD

and Den, Reliance now controls 24 million cable-connected homes of

these two companies across 750 cities, around 35% of the estimated cable
user base of 70 million. As Parthasarathi and Srinivas note, these acquisi-
tions have created effective cable monopolies in some regions (2019).
Nonetheless, while this may be a substantial holding in the cable television
market, it is only one piece of Reliance’s strategy of expanding market
share in the network economy through a so-called triple play of mobile
phones, TV distribution and home broadband. The media strategy is, in
turn, subservient to the larger aim of developing the underlying network,
where Reliance’s interests as an infrastructure business converge with its
newfound interest in data storage and mining. Thus, in announcing the
JioGigaFiber project at Reliance’s AGM, Mukesh Ambani emphasised this
would be the world’s largest greenfield fixed-line broadband rollout, with
a simultaneous launch in 1100 cities across India and a total of 1600 cities
connected (Pandey 2019b).

Financialisation ‘with Indian Characteristics’

Financialisation in India’s media sector, via both domestic and imported
sources, has been prompted in a large part by the massive capital invest-
ment costs associated with the development of digital and data infrastruc-
tures. From a Braudelian perspective, financialisation deepens the
integration of the networked media economy with the non-competitive
plane of anti-market capitalism. Three processes can be distinguished as
part of this shift. First, through financialisation, companies and industries
become objects of speculation. Second, financialisation engenders a reor-
ganisation of industry structures, by enforcing an equivalence between
market concentration and financial capacity. For Bouquillion, it is these
developments associated with media cross-ownership, increasing market
dominance and vertical integration that are fundamentally detrimental to
processes of competition (2008). Anti-competitive practices allow corpo-
rations to dominate their markets, take advantage of their customers and
manage the lavatory nature of valorisation through preferential modes of
financing. Thirdly, through financialisation, the networked media econ-
omy comes under the wider influence of the global financial sphere. All
three processes entrench the hierarchies of the economic world (économie
monde) within culture and communication.
Bouquillion’s work deploys Wallerstein’s notion of a concentric model
of influence and exploitation, figured by core, semi periphery and
 3 THE NETWORKED MEDIA ECONOMY AND THE INDIAN GILDED AGE 55

periphery, with Anglo-American institutions at the centre of the financial

web (1991). The manner in which corporations interact with finance in
India, however, raise important questions about the purported centrality
of Anglo-American finance in a Braudelian analysis. Khatri and Ojha
highlight three elements that define how financial relations have operated
in the post-liberalisation period (2016). First, the ‘business group’
remains an enduring institutional characteristic of Indian capitalist enter-
prise (Caussat 2017; Mazumdar 2011). Here, family-controlled con-
glomerates remain the typical unit of decision-making and dense corporate
networks based on business group, family and caste remain evident.
Second, banks do not play the same coordinating role as in other econo-
mies (Naudet and Dubost 2016). Indian corporate businesses rely on
political connections to facilitate financing from public sector banks.
Third, Indian corporate businesses display a “cavalier attitude toward
loan repayment because they have very little of their own capital” at stake
(Khatri and Ojha 2016, p. 64). The private wealth of family conglomer-
ates is well protected by fraudulent accounting practices and tax loop-
holes, while the financial r­ eliance of businesses on the state banking sector
has led to the overhang of non-performing assets (NPAs) on the ledgers
of state banks (Mukhopadhyay 2018).
Public banks typically take on private sector losses but are, in turn,
recapitalised by the state, especially when it comes to what are regarded as
priority areas. In that respect, the digital sectors have been heavily favoured,
even though the costs of digitisation and infrastructure upgrades have
been very high. Even with the public sector backstop, Reliance Jio’s entry
into the market came at a time when debt levels were already affecting the
major players in this sector. The Reliance ADA Group led by Anil Ambani,
as the parent of RComm, was forced into bankruptcy and taken to court
by the Ericsson group for non-payments of debt (Kurup 2019a; Shrivastava
2018). Another major player in the network infrastructure space, the Essel
Group faced similar problems and was forced to seek buyers of its assets.
Vodafone Idea may have to exit the market, due to rulings that impose
significantly higher government dues on data traffic. For the previous two
decades, the controlling shareholders (often called ‘promoters’) in large
business businesses could expect sympathetic treatment from their lend-
ers, typically state banks. A seismic change came in 2016, when the gov-
ernment approved the formation of the National Company Law Tribunal
(NCLT) and passed the Insolvency Bankruptcy Code (IBC), both of these
56 S. FITZGERALD

initiatives being enacted in response to the dire state of bank lending as

corporate loan defaults reached drastic levels.
The IBC determines that a defaulting company’s boards and manage-
ment can be removed and assets put up for sale. As banks scaled back their
lending, heavily indebted groups turned their attention to the long- stag-
nant corporate bond market, mutual funds and non-bank institutions. The
Reserve Bank of India put a limit on bank exposure to individual groups.
Financial institutions now have greater confidence in getting their invest-
ments back and crucially they have begun to secure loans against the pro-
moter’s personal shares in listed companies. Following bond defaults of
IL&FS, a big infrastructure group, in 2018, weaker promoters found it
harder to renew debt financing and mutual funds began to sell shares
when a decline in value challenged their claims on the debt. This forced
some promoters, notably Essel Group’s Subhash Chandra to sell off parts
of their empires to pay back creditors with a claim on their personal shares.
These forced sales reflect a shift in balance in a system long typified by pas-
sive investors and toothless banks.
In this new context, private equity firms inevitably become larger play-
ers, as buyout firms fill the void for companies cut off from bank lending
or the corporate bond market (Wilson 2019). There are also new oppor-
tunities for the strong, as billionaire family businesses increasingly con-
ducting private market transactions via private equity firms (UBS/PwC
2017). The value of private equity deals in India hit a peak in 2019, with
the largest private equity deal ever in India, a US$ 3.66 billion investment
by Canadian firm Brookfield Infrastructure Partners in one of Reliance’s
network infrastructure investment trusts which controls 170,000 telecom
towers (Kurup 2019b). Reliance had previously signed another deal to
raise US$14 billion through the sale of a 20% stake in RIL’s refining and
petrochemicals business to Saudi Aramco. With the new 5G spectrum auc-
tion scheduled for the 2019 financial year, one commentator noted that
“this is grave news for RIL’s competitors, whose resources now look even
more scarce in comparison to the conglomerate” (Philipose 2019). Thus,
it is by no means clear that the larger players in India’s networked media
economy have passed under the domination of the global financial sphere
and are driven by “the drum beat of Wall Street, quarterly returns and the
stock price” (Garnham 2004, p. 99).
 3 THE NETWORKED MEDIA ECONOMY AND THE INDIAN GILDED AGE 57

Data Protection and the Search

for National Champions

Institutions of the state are equally crucial to Braudel’s explanation of

capitalist anti-market dynamics, given their capacity to organise oligopolis-
tic competition and guarantee the international hierarchy of capitalist
interests. In India, both before and after independence, the state has
played a critical role in enforcing domestic monopolies and oligopolies,
while periodically tilting the balance between national and international
capital interests. The most recent example, in 2018, is a series of regula-
tions and policy statements on data localisation that are intended to con-
stitute parts of a new Data Protection Framework. In April 2018, the
Reserve Bank of India directed payment firms to store data locally. In July
2018, the Personal Data Protection Bill 2018 mandated that an active
copy of personal data records be stored in India. In December 2018, new
e-commerce rules prevented foreign companies from selling products in
India from their own affiliated companies, causing the likes of Amazon
and Walmart to significantly restructure their operations. Separately, a
draft report from a panel working on cloud-computing policy recom-
mended that data currently kept in the cloud be stored in India. In
February 2019, the Data Protection Framework was more firmly enunci-
ated in the E-Commerce Policy draft, which also seeks to regulate cross
border data flows and mandates that after a three-year period all data gen-
erated in India, via social media, search engines and e-commerce, must be
stored in India. Effectively, this furthered the proposition enunciated in
the Government’s earlier Electronic Commerce 2018 consultation paper
that Indian data should be “stored exclusively in India” (DPIIT 2018,
p. 6; cf. Goel 2018, 2019).
Beyond a broad shift to data localisation as the key element of the Data
Protection Framework, the Draft National E-Commerce Policy posits a
substantially different perspective from the Personal Data Protection Bill
and the TRAI recommendations on Privacy, Security and Ownership of the
Data in the Telecom Sector released in July 2018 (MEITY 2018; TRAI
2018). While also acknowledging that individuals are the right holders of
their data, there is a an important shift in the E-Commerce Policy, which
states: “The data of a country, therefore, is best thought of a collective
resource, a national asset, that the government holds in trust, but rights to
which can be permitted. The analogy of a mine of natural resource or
spectrum works here” (DPIIT 2019, p. 14). It proposes viewing data as a
58 S. FITZGERALD

property owned by the state and commercially licensed to those who seek
to mine it for the purposes of “maximizing growth and for delivering the
greatest benefits to all sections of society”. The policy further states that
the “the presence of ‘network effects’ means that … Digital capital (grant-
ing data the status of ‘capital’ at par with financial capital of a corporation)
has come to be reckoned as one that matters no less than intellectual prop-
erty or industrial capital (funds)” (DPIIT 2019, p. 6).
The Draft National E-Commerce Policy and consultation paper notes
that “just a handful of companies have managed to dominate the digital
economy” and its purpose was to boost “the domestic digital economy to
find its rightful place with dominant and potentially non-competitive
global players” (DPIIT, 2019 p. 15; DPIIT, 2018, p. 2). Previously, in
July 2018, India’s representatives at the WTO complained that developed
and dominant countries, such the United States and China, were attempt-
ing to instigate international rules on e-commerce in a manner that would
harm domestic interests in India. Reflecting the perceived need for a
robust Indian response, the secretary of India’s Telecommunications
Department, Aruna Sundararajan, announced in January 2019 that a pri-
vate meeting that the Indian government, having noted the success of
China’s internet giants, Alibaba and Tencent would introduce a so-called
national champion policy to promote the success of domestic companies.
The Wall Street Journal later reported that the intent was to promote
Indian companies in ways that allow them “to become global champions”
(Purnell and Roy 2019). In practice, all the changes suggested in the Data
Protection Framework and the wider push to create a national champion
are mostly likely to favour Reliance. As one Indian consultant noted:
“We’re witnessing the evolution of a big digital player … It looks like Jio
is emerging as a national champion” (Findlay 2019; Purnell and Roy 2019).
There is a striking overlap in the wording and imagery used by the
Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade in the draft
policy on Indian National E-Commerce and the mantra that equates ‘data
as the new oil’ being expounded by Reliance. This is not entirely surpris-
ing in itself, given the prominent role that Reliance executives played in
the formulation of the new draft bill, and their obvious benefit from legis-
lation that requires data created by users in India from e-commerce plat-
forms, social media and search engines be “stored exclusively in India”
(Sen 2018). Reliance has vigorously lobbied to have laws enacted that
would lead to data localisation, and the company also made this position
clear in its submission to the TRAI’s Privacy, Security and Ownership of the
 3 THE NETWORKED MEDIA ECONOMY AND THE INDIAN GILDED AGE 59

Data in the Telecom Sector consultation, once again calling for data locali-
sation, specifically in relation to Over-The-Top (OTT) operations. Analysts
have concluded that “if the ecommerce draft in its current form gets
enshrined as law, Jio will have a huge edge over others” (Sen 2018). In
e-commerce specifically, Reliance Retail already boasts 10,000 stores
across the country and is the largest organised retail chain by revenue in
the country. It is currently ranked the fifth-fastest growing retail company
in the world by Deloitte.
Mukesh Ambani has made it clear that he plans to use the Reliance Jio
network to turn RIL’s retail arm into an e-commerce platform. Unlike
international competitors such as Amazon, Reliance will be permitted to
operate an ecosystem model, in which it can sell its own inventory and
simultaneously act as the e-market operator. This model of operation will
not be available to Walmart-Flipkart and Amazon, unless they substan-
tially restructure their operations through investments in locally based
infrastructure and procurement. In order to house data locally, both com-
panies would have to use local data centres, which would be costly and
deprive their operations of the advantage of possessing a mature architec-
ture. Furthermore, the requirement to house data in India will open up
access to digital advertising on both platforms for Reliance. A Merrill
Lynch report concludes that this alone could benefit RIL by US$1–2.5 bil-
lion per annum (IANS 2019). Meanwhile, Reliance has announced fur-
ther investments in five tech companies, specialising in services ranging
from logistics to voice technology, all of which support the central goal of
integrating the group’s burgeoning “digital initiatives”.

Localising Platform Capitalism

The expansion of the digital economy and growing heft of large platform
operators from the United States and China, and now possibly India,
through the ‘national champion’ model, underscores many of the con-
cerns raised UNCTAD about unequal power relations in global data value
chains. An increasing digital dependency prompted by the market domi-
nation of the seven ‘super platforms’ aligns well with a Braudelian frame-
work that views capitalism as a system of power built on a global scale. As
Bouquillion argues, Braudel’s approach is in accord with other theorists
such as Schumpeter and Galbraith who argue that the power of large insti-
tutions over market dynamics invalidates neoclassical economists’ claims
that capitalism can be equated with the ideal-type conception of the
60 S. FITZGERALD

market (2007, pp. 173–174). There are, however, fundamental theoreti-

cal questions about Braudel’s proposed divide between a ‘fully competi-
tive market economy’ and a private anti-competitive realm of capitalism
(see, e.g., Howard 1985). For one thing, it runs counter to classical politi-
cal economy’s notion of ‘real competition’, in which positions of monop-
oly and rent-extraction provide the basis of ongoing competition (Shaikh
2016). From another perspective, it can be seen to infer that the market
economy ‘below capitalism’ is somehow characterised by transparency,
equal exchange and equilibrium. As Parthasarathi and Athique’s analysis
of the meso-level ‘market of operations’ in the Indian media economy
makes abundantly clear, the regional and cultural affinities, political con-
nections and power imbalances that mark the development of network
infrastructure at the local level invalidate any such notion of perfect com-
petition stabilising below the elite domain of capital interests (2019).
There are also crucial domestic characteristics that an approach based
on Braudel and inter-national dependency models tends to elide. If capi-
talism is too narrowly defined by production for profit in a world system
of exchange, in which countries in the periphery are “exploited” for the
benefit of the core, then the internal power relations that characterise the
development of the digital economy within a complex society such as
India can end up being understated, or even overlooked entirely. Equally,
dependency and world systems approaches to media and communication
can be easily manipulated through nationalist discourses in situations
where state interests and ‘business-friendly development’ are so often sub-
stitutable. Indeed, recent shifts across the world towards various forms of
state-sponsored ‘collective data ownership’, which clearly benefit domestic
state-capital alliances, can be too readily justified by making ominous ref-
erences to the ‘imperialism’ of the seven super-platforms emanating from
the United States and China. Given India’s considerable scale and diver-
sity, its highly concentrated capital distribution, uneven economic geogra-
phy, lingering feudal social structures and the close relationships between
political actors and family-held business empires, we should remain atten-
tive to the fact that core-periphery issues have to be understood as being
as much internal as external factors. In that respect, the greater utility in a
Braudelian analysis may be found in its application beyond the concerns of
world systems theory, where it could offer some fresh insights into the co-­
evolution of ‘crony capitalism’ and networked media economies.
 3 THE NETWORKED MEDIA ECONOMY AND THE INDIAN GILDED AGE 61

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 CHAPTER 4

The Derivative Values of Platform Capitalism

Akshaya Kumar

The recently concluded General Election in India was not only its costliest
ever, the overall expense nearly doubled over the previous iteration, in
2014. While the expense has gone up six times since 1998, in about two
decades, the jump between the last two iterations is alarming for a number
of reasons. Indian economy has been doing rather badly, particularly since
the demonetization event, in which the government excluded nearly 86%
of its active currency from legal tendering. Since then, there has been a
remarkable fall even in official growth numbers. Unemployment is the
highest it has been in decades, and small and medium enterprises have
been struggling to stay afloat, by all accounts. How do we reconcile with
the two contrasting set of graphics, then? While it may have increasingly
become a common sense of ‘life in capitalism’, the paradox of a struggling
economy confronted with the loudest, the most self-assured and blatantly
self-congratulatory government should be a moment of reckoning.
Particularly so, for those of us in media and communication studies who
are left befuddled by the extraordinary convergence between advertising-­
led trajectories of electoral and entertainment platforms. This chapter

A. Kumar (*)
IIT Indore, Indore, India
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 67

A. Athique, V. Parthasarathi (eds.), Platform Capitalism in India,
Global Transformations in Media and Communication Research - A
Palgrave and IAMCR Series,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44563-8_4
68 A. KUMAR

makes an attempt to unpack a little of this convergence via the political

economy of platform capitalism.
There is a growing pile of recent literature which grapples with, and
builds upon, the idea that the media audience metadata is hoarded and
exchanged across platforms in the new scheme of things. Expectedly, the
narrative typically begins with Google’s near-monopoly on search engine
market enabling target advertising to be embedded across a vast number
of platforms. Nonetheless, as Athique notes: ‘At one level, the mania for
targeted advertising is simply a more sophisticated manifestation of
America’s rejection of planned production in favour of guided consump-
tion. What is more significant is the multiple vectors of ‘market informa-
tion’ coming on stream, and their seamless automated operation’ (Athique
2019a). Hoarded data by itself does not qualify as a valuable commodity,
as any real authority on data capitalism would promptly remind us. Rather,
the value is added by analytics instead. That is why what we are confronted
with is not data collection as the primary enterprise, but various manifesta-
tions of algorithmic governance. Let us take the example of Netflix. Not
only has it been burning capital without charging the subscribers propor-
tionately, its advertising-free content means that Netflix’s doors are shut
even for the pre-eminent model of platform business—free content traded
for attention to merchandise advertorials. While it is not my intention to
speculate over Netflix’s longer-term viability, one is certainly encouraged
to take an off-side view of the phenomena of profitability and market valu-
ations in platform capitalism. Without discounting the value of data itself,
or of sophisticated analytics (as an entire set of mechanisms for data har-
vesting, classification and running algorithms over them), I would none-
theless like to concentrate on the lofted discursive inevitability of growth
by numbers which is essentially based on the monopolistic urge of digital
platforms.
To clarify this point, what I address as monopolistic in this chapter is
not necessarily a technical monopoly over the business segment. Instead,
my focus is upon the surge of businesses designed to be viable and profit-
able in the long-term only as monopolies. Invariably, they enter the respec-
tive markets with predatory pricing or free services which can turn
profitable only if they achieve monopoly control of the market segment in
question. To understand why such large quanta of capital are taking that
plunge, we must consider how computational capital powerfully reconfig-
ures the attention economy towards mass address, by building predictive
systems based on massive chunks of data and proportionate computational
 4 THE DERIVATIVE VALUES OF PLATFORM CAPITALISM 69

ability. Such systems, by breaking down habits, events and phenomena

into data-sets, claim to make futures predictable as well as tractable. Given
the thirst for inputs, this is precisely where advertising comes into the
frame—along with paranoid systems of national security—to harvest data
so as to manipulate consumer choices, certainly, but also to engender the
field of probabilistic calculus. The power of advertising, as it persists, rests
within the subsequent deployment of rhetoric, which may not exhaust its
prowess in any singular iteration of influence. Instead, the algorithmic
dispersal of rhetoric works best when it spreads as a contagion, as a force
unleashed, not merely to stimulate profit, but to catalyse value, unleashing
what Athique has called the ‘alchemical processes’ of the data econ-
omy (2018).

The Derivative Rhetoric of Inevitability

One of the catchiest phrases used for the 2019 elections, which was also
turned into Twitter hashtags and a music video shared by the official
Facebook handle of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), was Ayega toh Modi
hi [Modi’s return is inevitable]. As the song featuring Devang Patel—a
long-forgotten singer-actor of yesteryears—illustrates best, the vitality of
the phrases lies in its rhetoric of inevitability. It suggests that regardless of
all the corruption scandals and political charges of failure labelled against
Narendra Modi, the incumbent Prime Minister, he would make a return
to the office. I reckon the power of this rhetoric should not be mistaken,
since it was creatively citing an entire cycle of public debate over the BJP’s
diminishing chances in various state elections. The idea hurled at people,
therefore, was that you know this script already. Regardless of all the specu-
lations, there is an inevitability to Modi’s triumphal charge and his party’s
chances are now determined by the destined crowning glory of his iconic-
ity. A close cousin of this rhetoric was the phrase ‘If not Modi, then who?’
In this way, it was suggest that there is no alternative, hence the inevitabil-
ity. Indeed, the BJP has strategically turned a parliamentary electoral
model into a presidential one, at least for the sake of the public debate.
But such a rhetoric also invested a lot of ‘value’ in one cult figure, imply-
ing that while some odds may seem to be against him, the future is already
cast in stone, leaving no room for doubt.
Such a forceful hailing of the rhetoric of inevitability has upheld Modi’s
presumed monopoly over public imagination. The battle, after all, was for
that very imagination. The rhetoric of inevitability sought to barricade the
70 A. KUMAR

bearings of this potentially unwieldy imagination and put it in an enclo-

sure. It sought to claim ownership by making a derivative bid for power, I
would argue. Derivatives in the market are used to hedge a position or
speculate on an asset. They are derived assets, which operate by ‘con-
structing a “virtual” reality composed of relations between qualities that
need not correspond to the ways in which those qualities are related in the
lived practice of their underlyings’ (Arvidsson 2016). Born of key advances
in probability theory, derivatives offer a second-order logic of valuation,
by enabling the transformation of uncertainties—or intangible assets—
into calculable risks (ibid.). Their valuation is anchored by the fluctuations
of the values of the underlying asset. For derivatives to be lucrative, the
discursive landscape of transactions has to be infested with an unpredict-
able risk-quotient. The derivatives could be based on the speculative frenzy
about any risk-laden metric, such as weather (rain data) or currency
exchange rates. The higher the risk, the stronger should be the case for
entering the derivative markets to hedge one’s future against
speculations.
To understand the value of the rhetoric of inevitability, then, we must
take into account the risks it is pitched against. Such a rhetoric provides
vital guarantees on the political market of the derivative, which otherwise
thrive on the vulnerabilities of the public and the uncertain valuation of
their assets. After all, as John Andrews writes, the derivatives anchor con-
versations across disassembled publics and commodities:

Derivatives exploit risk by disassembling attributes of a commodity and reas-

sembling them into something ad hoc, unfixed, but nonetheless productive.
Similarly, publics are increasingly derived from individual identities, special
interest groups, or venture philanthropists, creating new attachments and
intimacies among numerous aggregates of individuals and groups. The pub-
lic does not disappear but rather proliferates, albeit in a kind of fractured,
unpredictable way. (Andrews 2017)

The plank on which the social as well as political logic of derivative is

best observed is advertising. In his seminal work on the social logic of the
derivative, Randy Martin (2015) suggests that as a financial instrument,
the derivative reveals the impossibility of economic knowledge, and is
marked by the production of volatility and risk stemming from the
attempts to hedge them, and from ‘a fracturing of shared values and com-
mon norms in the face of a proliferation of means for making sense and
 4 THE DERIVATIVE VALUES OF PLATFORM CAPITALISM 71

creating forms and flows of life’. In a sense then, precisely at the moment
when we could and indeed claim to have a better grip on the knowledge
of risks, we introduce much more volatility into the system. Martin adds:

The derivative operates by creating value from nonknowledge of the market

but also from the very contestability of value of commodities. The result is an
ever-increasing excess and noise in which a new social principle emerges: a
‘frustration that nothing can be done collides with a conviction that imme-
diate and targeted action can make all the difference, that arbitrage between
observed and desired outcomes and leverage of what can be made liquid will
create a propitious moment for a salutary context’. (Cited in Andrews 2017)

Bryan and Rafferty argue that derivatives play an anchoring function

for capital in a market where, for conventional economists, floating
exchange rates did not need an anchor (2006). In this conventional view,
the markets would gravitate towards the ‘fundamental value’—the notion
of an anchor underpinning the neo-classical argument for floating
exchange rates since the 1970s (ibid., pp. 268–271). This was, after all,
the period during which Keynesian economics, which had sought to
socialize risks, was steadily dismantled. It is the gradual erosion of the
mythical fundamental value during the dismantling that resulted in the
problem of trading financial assets (see Bryan and Rafferty 2005). The
financial derivatives were developed by capital as the means to hedge
against monetary instability and to provide measures for price certainty in
international financial markets. Derivatives are, therefore, products that
the market has found profitable to produce, ‘to compensate (as it were)
for the fact that they don’t systematically reflect “fundamentals”’ (Bryan
and Rafferty 2006, p. 273). The derivative’s conversion of nonknowledge
into a value also stems from the fact that it has no fundamental value. They
are, instead, a new solution to the problem of value, addressed in the
absence of fundamentals which could make incompatible capitals compa-
rable (Arvidsson 2016).
The next and the most recent step in this direction may be the block-
chain technology which comes with the libertarian promise of slipping
through all regulatory mechanisms. In a sense, cryptocurrency neoliberal-
ism, which bypasses the monetary control and exchange rates across
nation-states, is a key landmark in the triumphal charge of algorithmic
governance. For many, it appears to be a value in itself, since it further
gravitates towards the idea of uncompromising ‘fundamental’ valuations.
72 A. KUMAR

The valuation, therefore, remains vulnerable to influence management

where the intangible assets (such as, popularity indices) can be converted
into tangible assets (in effect, when they are modulated from qualitative to
quantitative events/commodities). What ties political representation—as a
domain of direct address but intangible, unreliable impact—with algo-
rithms of value production in finance capitalism are the digital platforms
which make a ‘plausible’ claim to convert influence into tangible assets via
complex modules of probability theory, enacted in concert with the gran-
ularity of targeted advertising.
The topography of the digital is rendered legible primarily by the units
of the infinite transactions that constitute it. The digital systems record
every iteration of such transactions before and after algorithmic process-
ing. In fact, increasingly, digital systems are designed in such a manner
that they precipitate and regurgitate more and more of these transactional
units (Athique 2019b). Transactions, then, are a way of the digital to
appropriate us as users instead of viewers or readers. Such actions are
enabled by the landscape of hyperlinks, hashtags, multimedia constella-
tions and complex layouts. The specific orientation of analytics may render
the metadata thus generated in preferred ways of legibility for the plat-
forms, but for the users the platforms must offer a whole variety of click
baits. Thus, there are two key reasons why these Internet monopolies offer
such an invaluable deal to political leadership. First, while an individual
liking a Facebook page or following an icon on Twitter may not mean
much in terms of conversion to votes, the overall metrics of digital transac-
tions, customisable across a differentially identified user group, engenders
robust probability metrics that can be traded further across the digital
network, essentially as derivatives. What is effectively traded and synchro-
nized via the network of dubious anchors, then, is not any fundamental
value but the calculability of risks (see Ascher 2016).
Indeed, to a large extent, this algorithmic sport with probability metrics
is enabled by the unique data/image/code constellations of digital media.
Second, slowly but steadily, the Internet monopolies have been hoarding
a highly disproportionate share of advertising revenues and concentrated
holdings of bandwidth and spectrum, thereby forcing political leadership
to consider an alliance of convenience. To this extent, the derivatives of
influence do not offer any guarantees. Instead, they offer a second-order
agreement to hedge the prevailing risks of nonknowledge in an increas-
ingly uncertain domain. The derivative rhetoric of inevitability promotes
itself in this very bracket, where value is produced in a second-order
 4 THE DERIVATIVE VALUES OF PLATFORM CAPITALISM 73

calculus. However fraught the calculus of rhetoric may be, its strength lies
in a networked projection—where multiple pieces of an aggregation
appear to be in a probabilistic consensus. The gap between the first- and
second-order calculus is where advertising in general and the rhetoric of
inevitability in particular thrive. Particularly so, since advertising offers an
ample opportunity to pump capital and manipulate the perception via
dubious but substantial claims, accusations and assurances most evident in
the explosion of fake news on digital platforms.
To reconnect with where we started, in a first-past-the-post electoral
system followed by a multiparty democracy ridden with identitarian fis-
sures of regionality, gender, caste, class and language, the derivative rheto-
ric of the inevitability of Modi’s foretold triumph holds disproportionate
derivative value, but not necessarily because of the price of the underlying
asset. The role of platforms such as Google, Facebook and WhatsApp
needs to be understood in precisely this manner, I would argue. Google’s
Page Rank and Facebook’s News Feed provide us with dubious, but none-
theless valuable, algorithmic guarantees by cutting down on the excess
and noise of the Internet. If Google indexes and ranks the Internet for us,
Facebook curates our daily feed of social atmospherics, deriving value
from our persistent attention to the vortex filtered by computational capi-
tal (Beller 2013). WhatsApp, on the other hand, has taken over as a pre-­
eminent news platform in small-town India (Mullick and Devi 2017). On
certain WhatsApp groups operating as ideological-communal enclosures,
news appears in the form of an invasive mutant weed. It germinates out of
stringer-informant networks, which work for tens of news channels, and a
whole variety of print- and/or web-based magazines. However, WhatsApp
has become the fastest communication channel to share unverified, alarm-
ist and provocative messages as news, particularly in the form of dubious
images and videos. The dubious character of such news draws upon the
noisy informality of the medium, which does not promise sophisticated
analysis.
WhatsApp news, then, is akin to a libidinal platform on which the pub-
lic and private come together to create value from another variant of non-
knowledge. The political and social scandals, on such a platform, legitimize
the ‘derivative’ rhetorical value of the news since the hidden—although
often explicitly added—inscription on such images and videos remains:
mainstream media will never show you this! The value of such dubious
‘news’ is thus amplified by the raw brutality of truth embedded in a docu-
ment which is bound to be diminished, if not set aside, by the various
74 A. KUMAR

layers of cross-checking and verifications. To that extent, WhatsApp

appears to offer a raw and direct interface with the scandalous truths which
are filtered out of television channels, primarily because they would be
oddly placed in the formal algorithms of the televisual ecosystem. As stated
above, then, the contestability of the value of commodities creates a sur-
plus value in the derivative rhetoric, on which entities such as WhatsApp
news are mounted. The rhetorical flourish in this derivative market is the
embedded advertorial surplus, which offers new values with their own
terms of (re)evaluation. The modern polity constituted on the basis of citi-
zenship tethered to the nation-state, otherwise tied to the efficacy of news
media, is thus outwitted by a platform economy in which nonknowledge,
anchored by rhetorical surpluses and advertorial imperatives, is engaged in
the task of value creation.

The Inter-evaluative Dynamic

One of the key features of the platform economy is the inter-evaluative
dynamic which emerges among a whole variety of users or between, let us
say, a driver and a rider. In the former case, users on social media could be
engaged to leave an evaluative footprint by liking, sharing, commenting
and so on. In the latter case, the driver and the rider could be engaged in
a transaction on the reconstructed cartography of the app, on which they
would also evaluate the other, while being fully captive to the algorithmic
control of the ridesharing company for all the substantial matters. The
app, like an electronic voting machine during the elections, only provides
the graphic interface of permissible choices. What these inter-evaluative
dynamics distract us into believing is that we are secure under the aegis of
computational capital, which ranks and effectively regulates civic behav-
iour, flushing out eccentric and poor retail practices. What such computa-
tional utopia pushes into the background are the degrees of debt,
unemployment, traffic congestion and unequal class relations which are at
the heart of the platform economy (as seen so clearly in the growth of
ridesharing apps). We are also led to believe that there is enough invest-
ment capital in the market to fuel such debt-ridden growth, without any
proportionate promise of profitability.
Nonetheless, the recently unveiled Uber IPO, which came with the
Kafkaesque ‘warning’ that the company may never make a profit. What
does Uber promise via a public offering for new stakeholders, then, if not
at least the horizon of profitability? I suggest the answer would be
 4 THE DERIVATIVE VALUES OF PLATFORM CAPITALISM 75

privileged access to inexhaustible reserves of capital, ensuring endless

growth without any market limitations. What the investors could yet bet
on, with some guarantees, is that regardless of its bleeding balance sheet,
Uber would never cease to attract more capital to pump more cars on
urban streets, more bank loans for car drivers and a climbing mountain of
debt. After all, such a mountain would fuel the growth of insurance, auto-
mobile manufacturing, auto parts and repairs, petroleum and a number of
allied industries such as food delivery, rentals housing and so on, which
have gradually altered the character of urban life. The promise of growth
is therefore a constant murmur between investible surplus of capital and
modern state’s developmental mandate. Algorithmic governance through
platform capitalism appears to offer a perfect blend to distract us from the
failures of the state to provide a fair platform for employment and distribu-
tion of wealth. At this very moment, to capture the tragic irony of the state
of affairs, the Indian Finance Minister has deployed the millennials’ prefer-
ence for ridesharing apps to set aside a grave ongoing crisis of demand in
the automobile sector.
However, whether on account of financial inclusion of the working
classes through digital wallets, or the Facebook free basics, or the
entertainment-­communication hybrid messaging service of WhatsApp, or
the generous bandwidth and Internet data offerings of Reliance Jio or the
incomparable largesse of Google, platform capitalism has sprung up a new
inter-evaluative dynamic between the state and large capital. This is per-
haps most evident in the Telecom sector where the public sector giant,
Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), has been gradually hollowed out,
even as various chunks of its key assets are handed over to the rival,
Reliance Jio. By itself, such a transfer of wealth from public to private
assets would qualify for the routines of neoliberalism. In this case, how-
ever, Jio offers a unique amalgamation of telecom, high-speed 4G Internet
data, digital commerce, media and payment services. It offers WiFi rout-
ers, mobile handsets and an entire range of multimedia and digital pay-
ment apps to work exclusively on the Jio network, even set-top boxes with
direct-to-home (DTH) service and multiplayer online network for gaming
with support for many platform controllers. Facilitating the growth, and
even monopoly, of strategic players in key segments allows the state to cut
down on the excess noise of the market, so as to amplify the derivative
value of assurances and guarantees evident in the public endorsement. The
vital move here is indeed the repurposing of a hence-renewed value
towards advertising.
76 A. KUMAR

Modi’s grand public endorsement of Paytm, Jio, Facebook, Google

and a number of such monopolistic players has of course been a matter of
much debate in the popular press. The loudest of such endorsements,
which occasioned the grandest possible self-advertisement in return, was
after the demonetization. In a memorable full-page advertisement pub-
lished on 9 November 2016—the morning after the late evening
announcement of the catastrophic decision—Modi appeared to endorse
PayTM, while on the surface, the latter congratulated Modi for taking ‘the
boldest decision in the financial history of independent India!’. This
double-­bill advertisement captures the very essence of an inter-evaluative
dynamic, which could make one legitimately wonder which of the two—
Modi and PayTM—was getting a larger share of the advertorial mileage.
Not only did PayTM, a digital payment service, see a rise of 400–1000%
within hours of the announcement, it was by no means unique in such an
enthusiastic uptake of what was soon to prove a catastrophic move. A
number of e-commerce companies—among them, Freecharge (a digital
marketplace for recharging), Zomato (a restaurant listing and food deliv-
ery service), Ola and Uber (ridesharing apps) were all quick to endorse the
move, congratulate the government and offer digital transactions as a
solution to what was effectively reduced to a ‘cash problem’ (Sankaran
2016). All sorts of local retail vendors and kiosks were forced into the digi-
tal wallet economy overnight, even if the digital money would go to bank
accounts which, having been rendered inaccessible, did not at all enable
them to conduct their own daily transactions.
Athique has discussed these issues in great detail, particularly the rift
between the coverage of the event in the international press vis-à-vis the
Indian press (2019c). While I have no fundamental disagreement with his
reading of the event as a ‘two-step process’ of Demonetization and
Cashless India intended to force India’s informal economy into mecha-
nisms of transactional legibility, I would also like to look further into the
ways in which such a move was also impelled by the larger push for making
intangible assets tangible. The crucial bit remains that monopolistic
growth of computational capital built on the mountain of debt procured
from investor capital without any horizon of long-term profitability (as
with Uber, PayTM etc.) is proving conducive to a particular variant of
state-form. The inter-evaluative symbiotics that emerge here may be cru-
cial for all of us. If advertising constitutes the kernel of a double belong-
ing, or an overlapping ‘market of interests’, for the state as well as
computational capital, the surveillance systems hold the other end of the
 4 THE DERIVATIVE VALUES OF PLATFORM CAPITALISM 77

inter-evaluative dynamic (see Parthasarathi and Athique 2019). The tech

giants of platform economy provide the sophisticated expertise needed to
break down torrents of big data into demographic, psychographic and
ideological profile clusters, which have been given an unprecedented valu-
ation in the conduct of contemporary politics. McChesney illustrates in a
revealing summary how the political parties have, if anything, raced ahead
of the advertising industry in their creative and sinister splintering of
the polity:

You can now acquire comprehensive information about large numbers of

people—what their views are, what they’re interested in, what sort of appeals
to them would be effective and what sort would not. This gives politicians a
tremendous amount of power to cherry-pick propagandistic messages suc-
cessfully and send them to people where it’s really going to work… [In
2012, the Obama campaign] used cutting-edge data collection to break
down voters, target specific messages to particular groups, etc. … [B]ecause
all of the messages were targeted to individual people online, they were not
really recognized by news media or the broader political culture… The irony
of the 2012 campaign was that it was the first time that the political parties
were in front of the advertising people. (2018)

In this key sense, the inter-evaluative dynamic, which emerges as the

potentials of platform capitalism, is fundamentally different from mass
communication. Since the masses have ceased to exist after the relentless
algorithmic scanning of every digital footprint on the network, the funda-
mental distinction between political campaigns, at least rhetorically built
on certain shared principles, and product positioning vis-à-vis individual
preferences, has been narrowing down. This requires us to look closer at
the advertorial takeover of the media, attention and political
communication.

The Dark Side

Obama’s 2012 campaign, as McChesney establishes, flipped a balance and
unleashed an unstoppable propaganda mechanism. It only took another
election cycle for these technologies to ‘turn to the dark side: instead of
trying to locate and cultivate potential supporters, use the power of this
technology to demonize your opponent and undermine support for your
opponent’. Infusing poison into the political atmosphere, this has set off
the fake news industry, which reaches millions of people with surgical
78 A. KUMAR

precision, and is not subject to criminal prosecution. Increasingly across

the world, the digital technologies are being used to mine and organize
data about citizens’ political preferences, so as to manipulate or reshape
them via clever and dubious campaigns. This is precisely the slot in which
WhatsApp sits in India, leading to the witty but derogatory coinage of the
term ‘WhatsApp University’, from where millions acquire their daily dos-
ages of poisonous news, history, biographies, scandals and clarion calls.
The BJP is well known to run an entire Information Technology Cell
which not only employs an army of paid trolls to heckle commentators all
over the Internet, but also produces and circulates ‘fake news’ routines
while obfuscating substantial criticisms of the government and the party.
The party, however, does not stop there; it runs a dubious network of
foundations, NGOs and private tech companies in deep collusion with
government institutions held to ransom by this network.
For example, HuffPost India did a major exposé on Sarvani Foundation
which was started to attract female voters and rendered defunct after 2014
elections, then repurposed as the Association for Billion Minds (ABM).
Numerous toxic Facebook pages and the campaigns ‘Main Bhi Chowkidar’,
‘Nation with NaMo’ and ‘Bharat Ke Mann Ki Baat’ were launched by
ABM, which also ‘compiles detailed dossiers on potential candidates from
each constituency, prepares poll booth-level political intelligence reports,
plots out routes for teams canvassing for votes, runs polling day war-­
rooms, and designs and manages online propaganda campaigns’ (Bansal
et al. 2019). Also, the BJP used a private tech company, Sarv Webs Pvt
Ltd., to push political propaganda by mass-messaging on WhatsApp,
maintaining a huge cache of mobile SIM cards to send messages through
multiple registered numbers (Sathe 2019). While Media Studies has always
traversed the overlapping edge of political communication and popular
culture, the pumping of electoral arena with monopoly capital has begun
to merge the two brackets entirely, so as to force us into the domain of
advertising proper. Jonathan Beller’s suggestion, that ‘advertising is an
assault weapon … a psycho-economic machine—a key component of the
social factory and, as such, an encroachment on the commons’ (Beller
2013), seems to account for advertising’s true character and its immanent
threat. The real subsumption of society by capital, Beller adds, marks ‘the
conversion of representation itself to advertising’ (ibid.). Indeed, when
the two appear to merge, advertising no longer remains an allied domain,
but encroaches upon all variants of re-presentation. In a creative but
insightful formulation, Beller adds:
 4 THE DERIVATIVE VALUES OF PLATFORM CAPITALISM 79

Advertising has worked its way into the sign itself and has generated the
advertisign. This is not simply the brand but also vectoral language: words
in a production channel, the micro-management of desire, the production
of new needs, the capturing of the imagination all in order to induce linguis-
tic and behavioral shifts in others is no longer merely the province of adver-
tising but of so-called human interactivity, now become advertisarial through
and through. (Beller 2013)

One could indeed recall the television channel, NaMo TV, which sur-
faced free-to-air just before the start of Lok Sabha polls and was taken off
just before the final phase of polling. Featuring in general entertainment
and news packages both, the channel presented the most blatant case of
political advertising, flouting the rules while the state looked away (The
Wire 2019). But it was only one among the many such campaigns—Namo
India, an apparel brand mainly known for its Namo kurtas and Namo
foods, which earned a lot of media attention when it began delivering
food packets to polling booths in the 2019 elections. This curious overlap
between random fan activities and party funded advertising amplifies the
double-bill advertorial patterns: as opposed to the demonetization-PayTM
adverts where Modi appeared to be piggybacking on a digital platform,
brands of various hues and sizes have begun to piggyback on the Modi
brand. Such cross-­promotional excess is not always fine-tuned by algorith-
mic precision, after all. We can safely conclude that there are different tiers
of advertorial excess, which operate simultaneously with varying degrees
of precision about the target demographic.
The crucial move in the political arena, one could argue, has to do with
its growing intimacy with popular culture in general and reality television
in particular. Modi’s invariably scripted interviews with self-declared fan-­
journalists, or Trump’s absurd confrontations with journalists and celebri-
ties are staged to be scandalous in a reality television schematic. The
audience, both diegetic as well as nondiegetic, are fully aware that there is
something about the ‘event’ which distinguishes it from reality itself. And
yet, its variance from the relatively banal and interrogative reality offers a
new deal between politics and entertainment. Such a hybrid emerges from
our habituation in the atmospherics shared across the media palette (news
channels, daily soaps, reality shows), where political communication is
reduced to a spectator sport in which sides have already been taken and
the staged event showcases the battle (see Kumar 2015; Ohm 2014).
McChesney traces these dramatics back to the hollowing out of journal-
ism, due to the sudden withdrawal of advertising revenue:
80 A. KUMAR

The basic problem is that the giant internet companies—especially Facebook

and Google—are taking away the advertising money that would’ve tradi-
tionally gone to some newspaper or journalism-producing entity. But
Facebook and Google aren’t using this money to invest in more journalists
or news reporting … The reason has to do with the end of anonymity, the
surveillance ability … [W]hat happened with the surveillance model is that
no one buys ads on a website … Instead, you go to Google or Facebook or
AOL, and you say, ‘Hey, I want to reach every American male in this income
group between the age of 30 and 34 who might be interested in buying a
new car in the next three months’, and AOL will locate every one of those
men, wherever they are online, and your ad will appear on whatever website
they go to, usually straight away … That means the content producers, in
this case the news media, don’t get a cut anymore. Those advertising dollars
used to subsidize most of their work. (McChesney 2018)

The sudden reduction in advertising revenues has drastically reduced

the resources required for sustained quality work (O’Regan and Young
2019). In effect, this has substantially reduced the credibility of sincere
reportage, reducing it all to opinions and theatrical drama of public dis-
agreements however ill-argued. In absence of a credible journalism that
would hold the basis for qualified debate, the door is opened wide ‘for a
rejection of any news one does not like as ‘fake news’. This is Trump’s
strategy, and it would have been regarded as absurd twenty-five years ago.
Now, it finds a population that has no reason to respect news media any
more than Trump does (McChesney 2018). Not only does this mean a
serious threat to all sorts of trades which traditionally ran advertisements
to raise capital, but perhaps more importantly, it means that to establish a
near-monopoly in a market segment has become a qualifying criterion to
raise capital. It is this debt-monopoly dynamic that constitutes the essence
of platform capitalism. As Uber’s case best illustrates, raising capital does
not require a healthy balance sheet, just as advertising does not require
facts. Monopoly constitutes its own self-advertising agency to raise capital,
propelled by the derivative rhetoric. Indeed, states may even consolidate
‘domestic’ monopoly capital to hedge their bets against the multinational
counterparts, introducing us to international relations and trade policies,
particularly with respect to regional, geopolitical and ideological blocks.
What is important to understand, particularly towards the enmeshing
of the vocabulary for political and popular communication, is that celebri-
ties are also a monopolistic construct, who could potentially serve a mul-
timodal function via computational capital. By creatively inducting the
 4 THE DERIVATIVE VALUES OF PLATFORM CAPITALISM 81

political into the popular, politics sets itself up for piggybacking on Internet
monopolies’ cross-promotional architecture. To unpack this better, I
would like us to revisit a phrase which was coined with respect to the
insurrectionary tendencies of web-based serials: the membrane of the pop-
ular (Kumar 2019). While such a membrane allows a tactile sense of the
aggregate popular culture, constituted by the interpenetrations across
media platforms and genres, it also collapses some key distinctions between
them. For Indian media in particular, but also for media in general, the
growing trend to navigate the increasing intimacy across what were auton-
omous tiers within the media economy is to deploy celebrity icons as the
alphabet of popular culture. We are therefore confronted with

a shift from relatively autonomous media ecosystems of film, television,

sports, politics and news to an increasingly contiguous ecosystem character-
ized by rapid exchanges. The membrane of the popular—a digital layer of
media activity where constituents are casually referenced without actually
being dealt with—holds the shape of this ecosystem … [T]he bulk of digital
media activity participates in this multimodal traffic to reconstitute the pop-
ular, for all practical purposes …When this advertorial imperative is expanded
and knit into a media constellation, politicians, cricketers, actors, models,
journalists or anyone sufficiently famous sit upon [the] flat bench of celebrity-­
function—which I call the membrane of the popular—from where they can
be picked, briefly mocked at, and sat right back down. (Kumar 2019)

The instrumentality of a broad celebrity-function for media is signifi-

cant, particularly how it has begun to suit the political leaders in their
campaigns. Across the world, such leaders are beginning to make incisions
upon the membrane of the popular, to knit themselves into the promo-
tional artifice so as to route and harvest the consumer traffic already navi-
gating the digital superhighways. Drawing upon the celebrity-function,
representation becomes an act of self-promotion, since the self amidst
advertorial networks is reconstituted with a keen awareness of the debt its
mere existence owes to capital. As advertisigns with a relatively stable
grammar, holding forth in the midst of free floating risks for capital invest-
ments and fluctuating valuations, celebrities emerge as derivative formula-
tions—their second-order valuations are saturated with numbers and
indices (box-office figures, endorsement deals’ worth, third-party rank-
ings etc.; see Kumar 2018). It is no wonder then that politicians increas-
ingly take their cues from celebrities of various hues, particularly actors,
and often try to ­piggyback on their popularity indices by sharing the
82 A. KUMAR

spotlight in media events. In such an exercise, the celebrities also offer

quasi-monopolies situated on the membrane of the popular, which politi-
cal leaders like Modi could share the stage with, so as to transform intan-
gible assets into tangible ones—photos and videos running on TV news
channels, Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp, where they could be liked,
retweeted, shared and commented upon.

Platform Capitalism as a Derivative Market

This chapter has ventured to grapple with one of the most fascinating
contemporary trajectories of platform capitalism, in which apparently
incommensurate and incomparable forms of capital are forced into a
second-­order dialogue via derivative logics. I have showed that political
representation in recent times has made vital public confessions to its
growing intimacy with Internet monopolies in particular and various
quasi-monopolies in general. Not only does the political leadership woo
monopoly capital, they are witnessed in an active cross-promotional bid. I
have argued that they are brought together by the need to offer a deriva-
tive solution to the problem of valuation, by offering to convert intangible
assets into tangible ones—a task in which celebrity-function plays a crucial
role, for it carries a tangible value soaked in popularity metrics. In many
ways, platform capitalism offers the long sought derivative market for
campaigners to claim probabilistic value in the high-risk market of politics.
Since derivatives derive their value on account of a future probabilisti-
cally extrapolated from the past, the commodities which command
extreme trade volumes are the most attracted to play with the resultant
projections and probabilities, which could be reliably sold on the market
of popular culture. This is where the arena of political and entertainment
activity come together, in a perpetual and desperate bid for self-­promotion,
as both conduits and guzzlers of advertising capital. With respect to Modi
and India, while his political rhetoric of Hindu nationalism has been given
significant attention, his bid to become a hybrid financial-economic
derived asset by mounting monopoly capital is not nearly as well appreci-
ated. It is not my argument that the latter should take precedence, but the
creative accounting between the two should be given its due valuation.
On the surface, much of what I have explored in this chapter may
appear to be routine neoliberal transactions between public and private
assets, where parties depend on corporate funding on the promise that
they would hand over due benefits to them from the backdoors of high
 4 THE DERIVATIVE VALUES OF PLATFORM CAPITALISM 83

offices. Subscribing to that implicit continuity for derivative monopolies

would however be erroneous, since it would overlook the publicness of
these transactions—best manifested in PayTM’s full-page news chapter
advertisement carrying Prime Minister Modi’s benevolent image as it
inaugurated a sustained spell of monetary doom for billions of Indians in
November 2016. The derivative valuations and their monopolistic
exchanges depend on the very publicness of social algorithms, which is
what allows them to function as the engines for the probabilistic calculus
of platform capitalism. If data mining and advertisement are two key com-
ponents of digital platforms, it is their larger participative mandate—to
showcase ‘the (digital) people’ as formal signatories to the process—that
necessitates the aggregation of digital transactions to appear in full public
view as source and symbol of sovereign power, thereby allowing the
users/citizens/audience to hedge their own portfolios with the ‘tangible
assets’ of popular politics.

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 PART II

Platform Businesses
 CHAPTER 5

Amazon Prime Video: A Platform Ecosphere

Ishita Tiwary

In the summer of 2018, I found myself hooked to the weekly Amazon

Prime Video stand-up comedy competition show Comicstaan. I noticed
how the interface design influenced my viewing of the show. On the left-­
hand side, there was a tab titled X-ray, which contained the names of all
the contestants and judges appearing on screen before me. In the autumn
of 2018, I am renewing my postpaid mobile plan with the telecom giant
Vodafone. I am informed that it comes with a free subscription to Amazon
Prime Video for a year and I receive text alerts from Vodafone to remind
me of my free one-year subscription to Prime Video. Fast forward to the
winter of 2018, I am watching a promotional music video on YouTube for
the upcoming Bollywood movie Zero, the bottom-centre portion of the
screen flashes the logo of Amazon Prime, informing me of the availability
of the song on Amazon Prime music service.
I begin with this experiential anecdote as it is evocative of Amazon’s
efforts to establish a platform ecosphere in the Indian media economy. In
this chapter, my working definition of ecosphere attempts to address the

I. Tiwary (*)
Concordia University, Montréal, QC, Canada
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 87

A. Athique, V. Parthasarathi (eds.), Platform Capitalism in India,
Global Transformations in Media and Communication Research - A
Palgrave and IAMCR Series,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44563-8_5
88 I. TIWARY

ways in which a platform brand integrates its customers within a portfolio

of digital goods and services. I will argue that this is where Amazon Prime
Video differs from dedicated subscription-video-on-demand (SVOD)
platforms, due to the embedding of its video platform within the larger
umbrella of services that it offers (specifically its music platform, Alexa
assistant and its wider e-commerce operations). This is the strategic
approach with which Amazon Prime enters the audiovisual market, not as
a television provider per se, but as a seller of video products densely inter-
linked to multi-sided markets in retail, advertising, music, data and finance.
It is the situation of Amazon Prime Video within this platform ecosphere
that I will begin to deconstruct in this chapter. To begin with, I will
attempt to establish a working definition between various overlapping
usages of the terms platform and ecosystem. Firstly, the widespread adop-
tion of the term ‘platform’ over the past decade has been consciously fash-
ioned from the available cultural vocabulary by apex stakeholders with
specific aims. It is carefully massaged in both industry literature and popu-
lar discourse in order to affect a particular resonance for particular audi-
ences (Gillespie 2010). Propositions for platform economies ‘are efforts
not only to sell, convince, persuade, protect, triumph or condemn, but to
make claims about what these technologies are and are not, and what
should and should not be expected of them’ (Berland 2010).
I posit the term ecosphere in recognition of the explicit integration of
content streams across a broader multi-product platform that is enabled,
but not justified, by the technical ecosystem of digital technologies and
mobile phones in particular. Amazon is itself taken as a particular example,
since it has been a pioneer of horizontal expansion across products and
has, in the process, developed an underlying ecosystem of data centres and
services that has itself become a very large component of the digital econ-
omy. In this sense, unlike many of the other platforms active in the over-­
the-­top (OTT) video market, Amazon plays a larger strategic role in both
ecosystem (infrastructure) and ecosphere (retail market). This makes
Amazon a far bigger player than its headline share of the media production
sector suggests, a dynamic which not only provides numerous advantages
for its component businesses and ventures, but also shapes a set of market
strategies in OTT video that are distinct from the traditional logics of
media producers, and even from other OTT platform variants such as
Netflix. Taking a single-sector approach to the OTT video boom thus far,
most studies of SVOD platforms have focused upon the impact of Netflix
in the markets of the Global North. This has included detailed discussions
 5 AMAZON PRIME VIDEO: A PLATFORM ECOSPHERE 89

around internet-distributed television (IPTV), geo-blocking and content

acquirement (see Lobato 2016, 2019; Lotz 2017; Lotz et al. 2018; Wayne
2017). In the case of Amazon Prime Video, however, the provision of
media content is only one part of a larger commercial proposition.
In this chapter, I want to think through the emerging Amazon eco-
sphere in India in terms of its negotiations with the distinctive market
conditions in play in India’s OTT video market. My opening anecdote
predicates this inquiry by demonstrating how the integrative experience of
platform ecospheres has already become ubiquitous in everyday life. One
therefore gets an everyday and immediate sense of the expansive horizon-
tal integration of a platform such as Amazon Prime Video, through its
tie-ins with telecom operators and advertising clients, inter-promotional
strategies for content and cross-promotion strategies for their larger suite
of platform services. The extent of this inter-linked ecosphere conse-
quently raises immediate and critical questions about where an analysis of
Amazon’s SVOD service should begin and end. In this chapter, I will
sketch the contours of the SVOD market in India, in order to identify the
future provocations likely to emerge through the study of SVOD plat-
forms in the global south. I will go on to consider the promotional strate-
gies utilized by Amazon Prime Video in order to enter the Indian market,
before proceeding to a brief discussion of the mobile ecosystem upon
which SVOD services in India overwhelmingly depend. I will then go on
to address Amazon Prime Video’s formulation of content acquirement
and creation strategies. Finally, I will seek to explicate how Amazon, as a
‘global’ SVOD platform attempts to ‘localize’ its ecosphere model as a
customer experience in the Indian market.

Integrated Brand Strategies

Amazon Prime Video was launched in the Indian market in December
2016 (Television Post 2018). According to the Financial Express, a mix of
direct-to-home (DTH) service providers, international content aggrega-
tors and distributors, broadcasters and telecom operators are currently
active in the market for online streaming in India (Nath 2017). As of
2018, there are approximately 30 online video streaming platforms that
comprise of 90 million active viewers (ibid.). Drawing on their existing
advantages in content archive and links to broadcaster and telecoms pro-
viders, India-based platforms are the market leaders, with HotStar at
69.4% of market share. Of the global platforms operating in the market,
90 I. TIWARY

Netflix has 1.4% of the market share as opposed to Amazon Prime’s 5%. It
is estimated that, the Indian arms of Amazon Prime Video and other key
video streaming platforms spent Rs. 300 crores in 2018 ($41.5 million)
on advertising designed to encourage individual viewing as a habit in a
market where collective viewing has always been the norm. Ritika Pant’s
research also notes that the Indian market is governed by acute price sen-
sitivity, which has seen a freemium (free + premium content) model being
adopted as the primary strategy for attracting subscribers for online video
services (Pant 2019). This is currently the market norm, since local SVOD
platforms such as HotStar operate on this model. A recent chapter in the
Hollywood Reporter has also noted that the most successful platforms in
India are those that largely depend on advertisement revenues and hence
YouTube (advertiser driven) and HotStar (freemium model) lead the mar-
ket (Bhushan and Brzeski 2018). For Amazon Prime Video, it raises the
question of how to best monetize itself in market primarily driven by the
advertisement-funded model.
Thus far, pricing has been a key factor driving SVOD subscription
growth in India. Amongst the three major video streaming platforms in
India (Amazon Prime Video, HotStar, Netflix), Amazon Prime Video is
the cheapest platform to subscribe to amongst the three as is costs Rs. 499
($7) a year, which works to Rs. 42 ($0.58) a month. In India, non-Prime
subscribers will be able to use Amazon Prime at a price of Rs. 129 ($1.79)
per month. Amazon offers a number of benefits to its Prime members in
India. Prime members get free scheduled delivery, discounted same-day
delivery, exclusive deals, unlimited access to video streaming via Prime
Video and an ad-free access to playlists via Prime Music. Over time, ana-
lysts expect Amazon’s local content investments, product integration and
tie-ups with local telecom companies to be the key drivers for Amazon
Prime Video. At the global level, Michael Wayne observes that Amazon’s
ability to forge symbiotic relationships and craft their service around well-­
established TV brand identities must be understood in relation to the
company’s broader commercial interests. He notes, that Amazon is an
e-retailer that uses its SVOD platform to drive customers to its Prime
membership program (whose members make more purchases more often
than non-members). In that respect, it is significant to note that Amazon
Prime’s key competitor in the Indian market is not Netflix, but the
e-retailer Flipkart (recently acquired by Walmart). We see traces of this
larger strategic objective through the pricing strategy described above, but
it becomes more evident when one charts the way Amazon has integrated
 5 AMAZON PRIME VIDEO: A PLATFORM ECOSPHERE 91

its video service with its other offerings in India (see Wayne 2017). This
horizontal integration is pursued though the synchronization of Amazon
Prime Video with Amazon’s overarching Prime services, with its music
platform in particular, and through commercial partnerships with India’s
telecom giants.
Amazon launched its music streaming service, Amazon Prime Music,
February 2018 as a companion to Prime Video. The ad-free music stream-
ing service came with no additional cost to Prime subscribers. Amazon
Prime Music inked deals with top-five music labels in the country, includ-
ing T-Series, Tips Music and Sony Music. Amazon is also actively seeking
to integrate its shopping and viewing services and has already added its
voice assistant, Alexa, to Prime Video as a tool for users to search and
watch content by using voice control. The obvious goal is to integrate
Amazon Prime Video and Music and e-retail within the large Amazon
ecosphere, where, if you are watching a movie on Prime Video, retail ads
for what the character is wearing will automatically appear along with the
video. According to Amazon, this new overlay screen will be called ‘X-ray’
and will appear over whatever you are watching. Vijay Subramanian, head
of content for Prime Video India, has stated in an interview:

Amazon’s goal is to make it as easy for the customer to get what she wants.
We are always looking to innovate. For example, the new show Comicstaan
has a skill built into Alexa, where you can ask for a joke from a comedian.
We are completely focused on x-ray. We want to populate as that as much as
we can to give customers a good customer experience to make their engage-
ment deeper. We will constantly keep adding to the x-ray feature. It is as
much a content focus for us as creating content. (Suvarna 2018)

This seamless vertical integration of its shopping, music, voice assistant

and video platforms, makes Amazon a unique player in the market, where
all the component Amazon platforms are linked in a feedback loop to each
other. This synchronization, is intended to foster customers who will sub-
scribe to the entire umbrellas of services. However, this platform eco-
sphere also has to be tailored locally, taking into account the media
infrastructures, taste cultures and regulatory norms that structure Indian
media markets. In a context characterized by the rapid and uneven devel-
opment of digital markets, surveying the state of telecommunication infra-
structures in India becomes crucial to understanding the milieu in which
the Amazon ecosphere is being designed.
92 I. TIWARY

Expanding Infrastructures
Ramon Lobato has noted that SVOD platforms are heavily reliant on tele-
communications infrastructure (Lobato 2016). Various internet geogra-
phers have also pointed out that infrastructure is vital as to how to
experience the internet (Zook 2006; Warf 2013). For streaming video
applications that require high download speeds, location is especially
important. Lobato cites the example of Netflix which requires 0.5 mbps
(megabits per second) and recommends a level of 3.0 mbps. However, in
India, the average speed is well below 3.0, effectively putting Netflix out
of bounds for most users. Moreover, SVOD streaming services require a
credit card account, which constitutes a financial infrastructure require-
ment that remains out of reach for the majority. Consequently, both access
rates and purchasing power are highly stratified in India’s digital economy.
Despite having half a billion users, only 50 million are enabled to carry out
transactions online, a prerequisite for becoming regular customers of big
e-players such as Amazon (Sachitanant 2018). Given the socio-economic
factors involved, it is also pertinent that the language of the current
Amazon user base is predominantly English, since this signifies an elite
socio-economic profile. Nonetheless, those left behind in the onset of
Web 2.0 due to lack of infrastructure are now entering the internet econ-
omy due to the massive growth of mobile-phone ownership (Rashmi
2018). Emerging as a ‘mobile-first’ market, India is now home to 460
million internet users, second only to China.
According to KPMG, the Indian internet user base is expected to reach
730 million by 2020. Growth will be driven by increasing mobile penetra-
tion, faster internet speeds, 4G mobile connectivity and cheaper data
charges (KPMG 2018a, b). As per the latest Federation of Indian Chambers
of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) Frames Study on the media and
entertainment sectors, there are around two million paid digital subscrib-
ers across application providers, including video platforms, and 1–1.5 mil-
lion customers who have moved entirely to digital media (mobile
telephony, internet) (FICCI 2018). FICCI expects the number of people
using digital platforms is expected to burgeon to four million by 2020
(ibid.). Furthermore, entertainment services are the most accessed ser-
vices via internet. Almost all telecom service providers now offer mobile
data packages for subscribers starting from a minimal price of Rs. 10 or
even less. Mobile phones with multimedia capabilities have thus given
people from all social strata an unprecedented access to all kinds of media
 5 AMAZON PRIME VIDEO: A PLATFORM ECOSPHERE 93

content. Mobile phones have become the preferred viewing device for
many Indians mainly due to reasonably priced smart phones, better inter-
net penetration and low mobile data charges. Even basic mobile-phone
models come with camera, radio, music player with recording and
Bluetooth options. Cost-effective data storage technologies such as micro
and mini SD cards have augmented the media capacities of these phones.
The availability of mobile packet-data technology has further connected
users to the internet at a low cost compared to broadband. This had led to
an explosion of content online and the market is steadily opening up to
local content production.
According to consultants Media Partners Asia, video content budgets
in India topped $4.2 billion. OTT video revenue in India was pegged at
Rs. 2019 crore (around $290 million) in 2017 and is expected to reach
Rs. 5595 crore (around $776 million) by 2022, helped by the rising adop-
tion of smartphones, smart TVs and other devices (KPMG 2018b)
Bandwidth nonetheless remains a major issue as India has one of the low-
est broadband speeds in the world, an average of 2 mbps compared to the
US average of 11.5 mbps. Data charges have recently fallen due to the
launch of Indian telecom major Reliance Jio, backed by India’s richest
industrialist Mukesh Ambani with an initial $22.5 billion investment. The
service had accumulated around 240 million wireless phone users as of
August 2018 (TRAI 2018). This expansion of the broadband and DTH
infrastructure is linked to the Digital India drive. Digital India is a US $17
billion infrastructure programme intended to usher India into the
knowledge-­economy era. The vision is to usher in a flow of multilevel
transactions that will become the base for commercial, social and citizen
engagement. The project entails major public and private investments in
national connectivity, infrastructure, smart cities, e-commerce and
e-­governance. It is an aspirational project that aims to mainstream the
transactional economy and for India to become a recognized global power
in the digital economy. The Digital India drive is reliant on contribution
of private sector firms that are involved in telecommunications, data and
internet infrastructure, and a variety of digital platforms. These develop-
ments in infrastructure are absolutely crucial to the fortunes of SVOD
platforms in India.
A number of scholars have noted that studies of information infrastruc-
tures typically point to their similarity and their centrality in shaping the
global distribution, production and consumption of goods and services
(Dourish and Bell 2011; Gillespie 2010; Parks and Starosielski 2015).
94 I. TIWARY

Addressing the Indian case, Pradip Thomas has also observed that over
the past decade, the apparent ‘privatization’ of the internet has run in
parallel with the rise platforms whose growth rates are reliant on ‘network
effects’ and ‘exemplified by the enormous reach and shaping powers of the
big three—Amazon, Google and Facebook—enhanced by their algorith-
mic dominion over cultures, the idea of the social, political practices, eco-
nomic futures and their investments in and control over cloud computing
practices’ (Thomas 2019). Network effects are predicated upon audience
capture, which can be clearly seen in India through the sweeping integra-
tion of the Amazon platform ecosphere. It is equally obvious that the
SVOD scenario in India remains largely dependent on mobile-phone
infrastructure, which requires effective working relationships with the
dominant telecoms providers. To date, Amazon Prime Video has part-
nered with telecom service providers BSNL (Bharat Sanchar Nigam
Limited) and Vodafone. Vodafone offers its consumers a free Amazon
Prime subscription with Vodafone SuperNet 4G plans. In the case of
BSNL, customers get free subscription to Amazon Prime Video if they
buy BSNL’s Rs. 399 ($5.53) postpaid mobile plan or a plan package of Rs.
749 ($10.39) and above. In the Hindustan Times, Gaurav Sandhi,
Director and Head of Business, Amazon Prime Video, India, stated:

Prime Video has received an overwhelming response from customers across

the length and breadth of the country. We are thrilled that our association
with BSNL will expand the reach of Prime Video to an even larger base of
customers who can now enjoy premium content on a screen of their
choice—be it their mobile device or the television in their living room.
(Hindustan Times 2018)

Anupam Srivastava, Chairman and Managing Director, BSNL, chimed

in, stating:

We understand the customer shift towards a highly networked digital eco-

system. Customers today demand freedom and flexibility in shopping and
streaming content online. Our collaboration with Amazon India is our com-
mitment to stay ahead of times providing the best to our customers. It pro-
vides them access to thousands of Indian and international movies, videos,
TV Shows and music on the go. We are confident that our customers can
enjoy uninterrupted on-the-go shopping and entertainment benefits with
their Amazon Prime membership. (Hindustan Times 2018)
 5 AMAZON PRIME VIDEO: A PLATFORM ECOSPHERE 95

The partnerships with Vodafone and BSNL make it clear that the
Amazon ecosphere depends heavily on mobile-phone users for shoring up
its subscriber bases, with telecoms providers using the suite of Amazon
services as a lure to expand their own subscriptions. Within the Amazon
ecosphere itself, SVOD plays a similar role in developing a user base that
can be drawn into the broader suite of services. It seems evident, then,
that Amazon Prime Video cannot be properly considered as a standalone
player in the market for video on demand. Rather, it has to be understood
as part of a larger platform ecosphere, where one service cross-subsidizes
and create values for other sites of audience commodification.

Populating the Inventory

Having delineated the Amazon ecosphere in a material sense through its
hardware infrastructure, I now shift my attention to the domain content
creation and its regulation in order to demonstrate how the Amazon eco-
sphere becomes malleable to market demands. In December, 2016, when
Amazon Prime Video entered the Indian market, it brought original
shows such as The Man in the High Castle, Mr. Robot, Transparent, Mozart
in the Jungle and The Grand Tour. It also offered an assortment of licensed
TV shows in addition to Hollywood and foreign films (Bhushan 2016a).
Despite these offerings, it recognized that the Indian market is ruled by
local content. According to a KPMG report, Western programming com-
mands a miniscule 0.5% viewership compared to 60% for domestic enter-
tainment on Indian television (FICCI 2017). We have been here before.
Jean Chalaby in a classic study of MTV’s transition to European markets
in the 1980s and 1990s, noticed that ‘international’ channels were initially
oblivious to local market condition and culture (Chalaby 2005). They
vastly overestimated the appeal of US-based programming for European
audiences and subsequently underwent a process of localization, by hiring
multilingual presenters, translations and producing original content for
these markets. A similar story played out in India during the television
boom of the 1990s and is playing out again through SVOD platform
content-creation strategies (see Thussu 2007; Mukherjee 2018).
The consistently strong preference for local content has encouraged
international VOD platforms in India to aggressively procure and com-
mission content. Amazon Prime Video has reportedly invested $300 mil-
lion in producing Indian content, much more than the budgets of most
entertainment channels in the country. It has struck content licensing
96 I. TIWARY

deals with local players such as Dharma Productions and T-Series, garner-
ing exclusive rights to Bollywood and regional movies (see Bhushan
2016a, b; Jarvey and Szalai 2016). It has partnered with most of the top
Bollywood production houses in the country to expand its catalogue and
commission original series. Notably, Amazon’s Prime Video’s USP in
India is its stand-up comedy specials (Financial Express 2017). In
November 2018, a Hindi-language interface was added to Prime Video,
allowing Hindi speakers to easily navigate the video platform via desktop
and mobile apps, including Android and iOS (Ghosh 2018). It is also
producing Telugu-language and Tamil-language originals for South
Indian audiences. Amazon brought along what they described as the ‘best
practices from the US’ to support creative partners by providing script
consultants, writer’s rooms and technical expertise (Bhushan 2018). They
see the SVOD local content market in India as a ‘fledgling system’ (ibid.).
One of India’s biggest production houses, Eros Entertainment (which has
its own SVOD platform), noted that with these moves, Amazon had made
itself a tough competitor in the SVOD market (Szalai 2016).
Amazon debuted its first Indian series, the cricket drama Inside Edge, in
July 2017. Since then, the company has expanded its portfolio with origi-
nals like Breathe, Mirzapur, Made in Heaven and other formats, such as
the comedy talent hunt Comicstaan, the dating show Hear Me, Love Me,
the Telugu mafia drama GangStars and the musical reality show Harmony.
They also recently announced a new original series The End starring
Bollywood Megastar Akshay Kumar (Ramachandaran 2019). Inside Edge
was nominated in the Best Drama Series category of the 2018 International
Emmy Awards (Raman 2018). Commenting on Inside Edge, Vijay
Subramaniam stated:

Inside Edge, at the guts of it, is the drama of politics. The veneer was
cricket … These are things that are relatable. We are not creating this to get
somebody in London. We are creating this to make sure that every customer
in India loves it. And in that authenticity, comes the global appeal … [it] all
starts with a story and one thing we learnt with our originals is that authen-
ticity counts. The more authentic you are to your stories and the setting, the
more likely it is going to be of interest to people who are way outside your
radar. Prime Video enables customers to sample content that is of interest to
them and give them a customer experience to make it easy to follow con-
tent … adding regional languages to our library is a part of our localisation
plan … In the next six months, you can expect more regional languages.
Apart from this, we have started work on originals from Telugu and Tamil.
 5 AMAZON PRIME VIDEO: A PLATFORM ECOSPHERE 97

It is always a challenge when you are a fan of a particular regional content

and are living in another region. Sometimes the films just does not travel. An
important part of our quest is to bring the popular, latest films to the cus-
tomers as quickly as we can. (Ibid.)

With words such as ‘authenticity’ and ‘stand out’, Subramaniam is

clearly stressing local appeal and foregrounding Amazon’s generous
investment in creating local content. How should we think of the idea of
the local in this context? The idea of the local typically signifies local exhi-
bition, local screenings of national or international cinema and the dialec-
tic of the local versus the global (Toulmin and Loipendinger 2005). Neves
and Sarkar, locate the local within ad hoc practices of digital video-making.
According to them, with the advent of the digital, the video medium
expanded to include ‘networked publics and platforms for rapid duplica-
tion and sharing (Neves and Sarkar 2017, p. 17). For them, the evolving
global video space is now markedly different from the gradual dialectical
incorporation of various locals within a homogeneous and universal struc-
ture. Penumbral globality would, of necessity, remain partial and contin-
gent, as an emergence that nonetheless ‘gestures toward the irrepressibility
of local media practices in the face of dominant global norms’ (ibid.).
Amazon prime video’s localization strategy does precisely this, and I seek
to illustrate this pandering to the creation of local content and local audi-
ences through a case study of the hit Amazon Prime show Comicstaan.

Establishing Product Niches

One of the ways in which Amazon has strategized content production in
India is targeting what they deem to be ‘special interest areas’ for ‘young
people’ (Raman 2018). I will illustrate this by taking the example of
Amazon’s most successful series, the reality competition Comicstaan. The
show is about the hunt for the next big stand-up comedian in India. The
stand-up comedy scene became popular on Indian television with shows
such The Great Laughter Indian Challenge and The Kapil Sharma show.
The emergence of YouTube subsequently led to an explosion of comic
content, providing a platform for many budding comics experimenting
with political, observational, improv and other forms of comedy. Comedy
collectives such as AIB (All India Bakchod) and East India Comedy
Company and comedians such as Malika Dua, Aditi Mittal, Biswa Kalyan
Rath and Zakir Khan became household names. This encouraged the
98 I. TIWARY

practice of open mic in urban cities, often hosted by food and beverage
venues to attract customers. Many comedians have their own dedicated
YouTube channel, Facebook pages and Instagram presence. Comedians
such as Vir Das were invited to the American talk show The Conan O’Brien
Show, and Kenny Sebastien and Abish Matthews performed at the
New York Comedy Club (Bose 2017).
This exposure led Amazon and Netflix to offer a platform (to turn a
phrase literally) to these comedians to host their specials, since they already
had an inbuilt audience in the online sphere. Amazon did it most effec-
tively with Comicstaan, which featured seven of India’s most prominent
comedians—Tanmay Bhat, Kaneez Surka, Kenny Sebastian, Biswa Kalyan
Rath, Kanan Gill, Sapan Verma and Naveen Richard as judges/mentors
for handpicked contestants from all across India. The format was that
every week the contestants would come on stage and perform a different
sub-genre of comedy such as topical, sketch and observational comedy
amongst others. The would be marked every week based on a four-minute
open mic. The marking was distributed 50–50 between the judges and the
audience present at the taping. The top five of the ten contestants advanced
to the finale. Prior to the unveiling of the trailer, promotions for the show
had begun through the judge’s social media pages. The marketing cam-
paign also included TV and outdoor campaigns. On digital platforms, it
took over the masthead of YouTube. Closer to the launch of the show,
viewers noticed that the masthead of India’s leading English daily the
Times of India changed to the Times of Comicstaan for a few seconds when
visiting the website. Prime Video also integrated its Alexa service, where
some of Comicstaan’s judges mentored Alexa to be funny. Speaking about
Comicstaan, Vijay Subramanian, said:

Comedy is already one of the most watched genres on Amazon Prime Video
and customers, across age groups and geographies want to see more.
Comicstaan will take customers on a hilarious journey alongside some of
today’s most recognizable comedians, to search for India’s next big come-
dian. Unique, fresh and packed with jokes, the series will make you crack up.
The future looks funny indeed! (exchange4media 2018)

Ajay Nair, Chief Operating Officer, of the production company Only

Much Louder (OML), stated:
 5 AMAZON PRIME VIDEO: A PLATFORM ECOSPHERE 99

Comicstaan is the exciting next step in our long and fruitful relationship
with Amazon. It ties all the best parts of Indian stand-up together into
something fresh. Getting the country’s top comedians to nurture and men-
tor new talent is an idea that excited us, and it’s been extremely rewarding
to see it all come together. (Ibid.)

In its first week, Comicstaan became the most watched series on the
platform (Farzeen 2018). It is important to note here that all episodes of
the series were not available to ‘binge watch’. Rather, it followed the con-
ventional television programming model where a new episode was released
every Friday. Thus, although Jeanette Steemers has predicted the demise
of linear television and scheduled viewing patterns with the internet pro-
viding online video streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime,
the case of Comicstaan disrupts this narrative (Steemers 2014). Comicstaan
followed the broadcast model, precisely, in order to get a sense of the
audience, monitoring how many people were coming back every week to
check out the show on its platform. Like a movie release, the shows were
not released on fixed time but on a fixed day. The buzz around Comicstaan
was discernible: from think pieces of women comedians in India, to the
viral circulation of contestants on social media. Since then, the contestants
of Comicstaan can be seen headlining open mics across the country, and a
second season has just concluded on the platform. The show’s success has
hinged on ‘local’ conventions of audience-building and capitalizing on the
successful stand-up comedy scene in India, rather than the ‘global’ factor
of SVOD disrupting norms of distribution. The case of Comicstaan there-
fore demonstrates that content platforms need to have a grasp of the local
market and its demands. This required is further illustrated in the way the
Amazon ecosphere has responded to the demands of censorship regula-
tions in the Indian market.

Negotiating Regulation
Complaints levelled at SVOD services in Western countries have tended to
revolve around anxieties around media concentration and tax jurisdic-
tions. In Asia, policymakers appear to be far more concerned with assert-
ing content censorship and sovereign jurisdiction over moral standards. As
of now, internet-distributed services remain free of government regulation
in India and are thus attractive for some audiences because they can offer
uncensored English-language programmes. Nonetheless, Pradip Thomas
100 I. TIWARY

has notes that platform and infrastructure anxieties are being felt by the
Government of India, although primarily in areas where state privilege are
concerned as opposed to due to the potential consequences for domestic
content industries (2019). Thus, SVOD is seen primarily to pose a chal-
lenge to the government role in censorship. Consequently, a critical aspect
of building a content archive within the Amazon ecosphere is an evolving
negotiation of regulatory regimes and programming norms in India. In
India, the censorship of films comes under the ambit of the Indian
Cinematograph Act. The Indian Cinematograph Act was passed and came
into effect in 1920 in British-ruled India. Regional censor boards were
constituted in the cities of Madras, Bombay, Lahore and Rangoon and
Calcutta. After Independence in 1947, the board was unified under the
1952 Cinematograph Act and reconstituted as the Central Board of Film
Censors (Central Board of Film Censors India 2018). The ordinance was
updated in the 1980s to cover the regulation of analogue video. Television
content, however, is regulated in accordance to guidelines laid down by
the Broadcasting Content Complaints Council (BCCC), a self-regulatory
body set up by the Indian Broadcasting Foundation in consultation with
the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting as recently as 2011.
Under this regime, Indian broadcasters and cable carriers self-regulate
by pre-censoring content at the production stage. By contrast, an arbitrary
practice of censorship is imposed on imported English-language program-
ming in order to meet ‘Indian’ moral standards. Thus, for example, HBO’s
globally popular Game of Thrones had major story plots edited out, visual
details blurred and profane words/dialogues bleeped in the audio track
and left blank in the subtitles. However, in the absence of government
regulation, it is becoming apparent that some online streaming services
have already begun to self-censor global content. While both Netflix and
HotStar largely provide their subscription-based content uncensored,
Amazon Prime Video has adopted a more stringent approach to censoring
content in line with ‘Indian cultural sensitivities’. Thus, although web
content currently does not have formal censorship codes to adhere to,
Amazon Prime Video was sued in 2018 for airing ‘vulgar’ and ‘sexually
explicit content’ on their platforms (News Minute 2018). The case is cur-
rently being heard in the Delhi High Court which is awaiting the response
of the Central Government. For their part, Netflix and HotStar are push-
ing for an industry censorship code akin to one that exists in Southeast
Asian nations for Netflix, Fox and Disney. This move has been prompted
 5 AMAZON PRIME VIDEO: A PLATFORM ECOSPHERE 101

by VOD companies’ anticipation of the Government of India passing leg-

islation that they fear will be onerous for the industry.
On 15 November, 2018, Netflix and HotStar came to an agreement
with the Ministry of Information and broadcasting to adhere to a regime
of ‘self-regulation’ by adopting the ‘best practices internationally’ and to
come up with a set of sectoral guidelines (Pathak 2018). Amazon is oppos-
ing this move, as it fears that such a move could alienate its paying sub-
scribers who have indicated a preference for uncensored imports (Srivastav
2018). Despite its formal opposition, however, it is equally clear that
Amazon unilaterally adopted its own self-censorship route when it entered
the Indian market. For example, an episode of the motoring show The
Grand Tour is only 30 minutes long on Amazon Prime, while the original
is actually one hour. The half-an-hour difference is the sum of cuts made
to remove all references to a car made of beef (Bose 2016) Nude scenes in
TV shows such as Californication are pixelated (Dhingra 2018). Mindful
of cultural norms in India, Amazon Prime released two versions of the TV
series American Gods: censored and uncensored. The censored version
removed female frontal nudity, blurred out male genitalia and removed
references to a ‘holy cow’ due to the animal’s religious significance
amongst Hindus (Arora 2017). Responding to the Huffington Post,
Amazon has stated:

Amazon Prime Video offers the largest selection of movies and TV shows of
any OTT video service in India and give customers the choice on what to
watch. We respect our customers’ preferences and will comply with the reg-
ulations applicable to our service. Amazon is a responsible company and we
are here to entertain the Indian customer with award-winning content from
the US along with blockbusters from Indian and regional makers. We will
keep Indian cultural sensitivities in mind while offering this content to cus-
tomers. (Bose 2016)

Thus, as Wagman and Urquhart observe, the fact remains that where
you access the internet says a lot about what kind of internet you experi-
ence (2014). Similarly, as Graeme Turner and Jinna Tay observe:
‘Notwithstanding the internationalization of the media industries, these
days the answer to the question “What is television?” very much depends
on where you are’ (2009, p. 8). Lobato points out that approaching the
internet as a localized and unevenly available set of cultural experiences
reminds us that internet, just like television, is always locally configured as
102 I. TIWARY

well as globally networked (2019). This diversity of institutional forms,

production cultures, advertising systems and regulatory frameworks still
vary significantly between countries. In the example above, the likelihood
of audience objections and/or a response from the Indian regulation sys-
tem led to the adoption of self-censorship practices, proving that location
determines experience.

Indigenizing the Ecosphere

In their book Locating Television: Zones of Consumption, Anna Pertierra
and Graeme Turner argue that one can understand the localization of
television by placing it within the context of the diversity that exists inter-
nationally. They situate the consumption of television within the range of
structures, patterns of everyday life and industrial norms that determine
the importance of location to the audience experience of television (2013).
Their argument thereby provides a useful provocation for thinking about
SVOD platforms in Indian households and, from a material perspective,
for the framing of scholarship underway on SVOD platforms across the
world. Taking into account the distinctive local infrastructural conditions,
and how SVOD platforms create their ecosphere in response, emphasizes
the need for socially and culturally nuanced insights into the question of
‘what it means to experience SVOD platforms’. Given the materialization
of its audience in the Indian market, Amazon Prime Video’s platform eco-
sphere is evidently marked by highly segmented audience taste and profile,
low-bandwidth infrastructure, heavy reliance on mobile phones, regula-
tory inconsistencies, prudishness and a persistent reliance on celebrity to
sell content. The future intentions of regulators, the uneven purchasing
power and propensity of the audience and the competing presence of
major local and global players are all contingencies in the evolving strate-
gies of Amazon Prime Video.
Amazon Prime Video, fully recognizing this distinctive configuration of
content, audience, infrastructure and business norms, ‘Indianizes’ both its
‘skin’ and its internal structures to suit these market conditions. At the
same time, it consistently pursues its central aim of disrupting the local
media economy in order to entrench its own platform ecosystem at the
technical level. In terms of product offering, the process of content adap-
tation to local conditions is undertaken primarily as part of the broader
programme of developing the Amazon India ecosphere as a customer
experience. As a business model, the underlying imperative remains to
 5 AMAZON PRIME VIDEO: A PLATFORM ECOSPHERE 103

build a user base that can be locked in across a wider ecology of mutually
supporting services. This ideal ecosphere, with its multiple products, busi-
ness partnerships and value transfers is entirely in keeping with the model
that Amazon has developed internationally. At the same time, the process
of developing an actualized ecosphere in the Indian market has consis-
tently required Amazon Prime Video to develop new strategies for nego-
tiating distinctive and changing conditions of consumer taste, regulations
and norms. Accordingly, this chapter has begun to explore the strategic
evolution of Amazon Prime Video to date not only in terms of the Indian
SVOD market, but also in light of the larger platform ecosphere that
Amazon is seeking to develop. The evolution of the Amazon ecosphere
can thus be a useful model to understand the likely pathways for other
proponents of platform ecospheres, such as Apple and Jio. This is where
the primary field of competition for Amazon Prime Video will emerge,
alongside but nonetheless distinct from the wider proliferation of India’s
online video market.

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 CHAPTER 6

Telecom and Technology Actors

Repositioning Music Streaming

Christine Ithurbide

Throughout the twentieth century, the music industry in India has under-
gone changes in processes of production and distribution due to techno-
logical developments that have offered new opportunities. Since the
2000s, the entry of players from the information and communications
technology (ICT) sector—both Indian and international—has led to
important reconfigurations of the music industry. ICT companies started
positioning themselves as downstream intermediaries for the distribution
of musical content. In parallel, the expansion of digital infrastructure,
along with cheaper mobile and data access, has facilitated the development
of music streaming platforms, paving the way for a highly competitive
digital music market. A growing literature has explored the industrial, leg-
islative, technological and economic developments that have shaped
India’s music industry (see Manuel 1993; Zuberi 2002; Parthasarathi
2013). Recently, researchers have begun to focus on the impact of digital

C. Ithurbide (*)
University of Paris XIII, Villetaneuse, France

© The Author(s) 2020 107

A. Athique, V. Parthasarathi (eds.), Platform Capitalism in India,
Global Transformations in Media and Communication Research - A
Palgrave and IAMCR Series,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44563-8_6
108 C. ITHURBIDE

technologies (Gopinath 2013; Booth 2015, 2017). Internationally, the

digitalization of music has prompted researchers to question attendant
changes in the music industries, especially regarding industrial reconfigu-
ration and copyright issues (Anderson 2014; Hesmondhalgh 2009;
Hesmondhalgh and Meier 2018; Leyshon 2014; Pratt 2016;
Vaidhyanathan 2001).
This chapter explores processes of “platformization” in the music
industry in India by analysing the evolving relationships between musical
creation, music companies and labels, and considers the role of new inter-
mediaries in the digital music economy. I argue that the multiplication of
music platforms in India, available essentially via mobile and smartphones,
is the visible part of deeper reconfigurations of the industry in the digital
context. The displacement from the study of music platforms to the “plat-
formization” of music enables us a focus not only on a new object (the
music platforms), but also upon the multiples forces (historical and recent,
local and global, public and private driven) that are shaping the music
digital space. It enables me to unbox what typically appears as a catchall
and sanitized notion of “platform”, anchored into the global discourse on
creative industries and deeply rooted into the neoliberal approach of cul-
ture (Combès and Petit 2015). Discourses on creative industries typically
argue for a redefinition of the relationship between cultural products and
services by emphasizing the technological remediation of their distribu-
tion. This agenda has been institutionalized by major organizations such
as UNESCO, thereby legitimating the entry of information and commu-
nications technology companies into key segments of the economy for
cultural goods and content. Hence, behind the development of music
digital platforms, lies the expanding role and strategy of players from the
ICT sector.
Who are the different ICT players involved? How precisely do they
contribute to the reshaping of the music landscape? Are the same power
struggles observed internationally also at play in India between ICT actors
and historical actors of the music industry? A fundamental question arises,
regarding the logics that underlie processes of “platformization” and how
they may differ from older processes of industrialization of music. In this
chapter, I refer to the analytical framework proposed by Pierre Moeglin,
which highlights three distinctive and interdependent features constitut-
ing industrialization processes: technologization, rationalization and ide-
ologization (1998). In this respect, I ask to what extent is the process of
“platformization” representing the continuation of those three features at
 6 TELECOM AND TECHNOLOGY ACTORS REPOSITIONING MUSIC… 109

the heart of the industrialization of music? Technologization, closely asso-

ciated with the development of the industrial society, is linked to the prin-
ciple of substitution of capital for work and bears the mark of attempts to
automate living work (Moeglin 2016). Rationalization in the Weberian
sense, is not limited to the organization of work through managing and
planning (1963). It also concerns the economy (yield and profitability) as
well as the law. The desire to rationalize processes of production and dis-
semination of cultural products by technologies comes from the uncer-
tainty linked to the “symbolic nature” of cultural products (Caves 2000;
Bouquillion 2010). Ideologization should thus be understood in refer-
ence to Habermas’ critique of technology and science as “ideology”
closely associated with capitalist production (1970). More specifically, in
the context of “communication society”, ideologization aims at standard-
izing behaviour and promote economic adjustment (Combès 2004).
After outlining the evolution of the recorded music sector in India and
its logics of industrialization, this chapter examines how the restructuring
of the music industry is linked to the entry of Indian telecom operators
(Vodafone, Bharti-Airtel, Reliance Jio) and global tech giants (Google,
Apple, Facebook, Amazon). I will discuss the evolution of content and
economic models in music platform business in order to illustrate both the
emergence of a highly competitive market and the reinforcement of older
commoditization processes, whereby music is produced as a by-product of
other goods and services. In conclusion, I will discuss the challenges
related to the diversification of musical content and the transfer of value
for creators. My methodology will combine empirical material, including
semi-structured interviews conducted with a diversity of players from the
music industry in Delhi and Mumbai in 2018, document analysis of pub-
lications by the Government of India and its ministries and annual indus-
try reports and articles from the economic and professional press. My
analytical focus is the organizational structure of the music industry and
the trajectories of Indian and transnational players, their strategies, rela-
tions and collaborations with each other.

Music Industry in India: Contextualization

and Industrialization Process

The process of industrialization of music in India has always operated in

parallel with larger technological changes, with the arrival of digital music
being only the most recent example. From the beginning of the twentieth
110 C. ITHURBIDE

century until the 1960s, the music industry was effectively held by a single
company, Gramophone & Typewriter, Ltd., a global business whose cor-
porate roots lay in America, that came to operate, evolve and consolidate
in British India initially based out of Calcutta (Parthasarathi 2013). This
effective monopoly ended with the entry of new players in the 1970s,
starting with Polydor and Indian Record Company (INRECO). The
music market diversified in the 1980s with T-Series and again in the 1990s,
with the entry of Sony Music (1997), Universal Music (1999) a new major
Indian company, Times Music (1998). Originally, the Gramophone
Company, Polydor or Sony were electronic good manufacturing compa-
nies primarily interested in selling gramophones and records players. As
Hesmondhalgh explains in his macro-historical approach, the technologi-
cal changes that have marked the evolution of the cultural industries have
always been driven by the economic interests of major consumer-electric
goods companies who have been manufacturing media supports for cul-
tural content and whose economy is based on the development and pro-
duction of systems and devices made increasingly obsolete (2013).
For a long time, the consumer market for the music industry in India
was confined to an urban elite, since record players were expensive and
unavailable to the masses. The arrival of the audio cassette in the mid-­1980s
decentralized and diversified the consumer base by making playback tech-
nology more accessible, and this was reflected in the emergence of regional
commercial music and the sale of cheap cassettes (Manuel 1993). The
cassette industry rapidly developed by drawing on untapped demand and
the resources of the unorganized sector:

Entrepreneurs would go the electronic market in Lajpat Nagar Delhi, bor-

row some money in the morning, produce a large number of K7 during the
day, and go back in the evening with the K7 in exchange of the money they
had borrow. If the MP of the original song cost INR 45, 90 the K7 for the
same song would cost INR 18. The K7s (resulting from piracy) were then
distributed for cheap on the wholesale markets in Delhi and Mumbai.
(Churamani, interview 2018)

This comment shows how the industrialization of music in India has

been inextricably intertwined with formal and informal production and
distribution channels. The industries of the formal sector started losing
money because of administration cost and so on. Film producers would
sign with the organized music companies but would often not receive
 6 TELECOM AND TECHNOLOGY ACTORS REPOSITIONING MUSIC… 111

royalties because those companies were losing money. Hence, the rela-
tionship between film producers and music companies evolved towards a
flat fee system. Instead of waiting for royalties, music companies paid
money upfront to the producer to close the deal. Producers were then
happy, as they had their money. Given their heavy sunk costs, film produc-
ers started to look forward to this amount of prepaid money and there was
no question about composers’ rights and so on. This arrangement was
essentially a contract for service between music companies (responsible for
paying royalties) and film producers (who commissioned the music
content).
The liberalization of the Indian economy from the late 1980s onwards
had numerous consequences for the music landscape. Restrictions on for-
eign equity ownership were relaxed, which encouraged the inflow of for-
eign direct investment (FDI) into this sector. International majors began
to develop their presence in the India market, especially Sony Music,
Universal Music Group, Time Warner (USA) and EMI (UK). However,
they had to adapt to a sector overwhelmingly led by film music and also
fragmented into regional language product markets dominated by domes-
tic companies. This led initially to alliances between the major interna-
tional players and local companies. Sony Music Entertainment is the
largest and oldest foreign-owned label in India thanks to its acquisition of
Bollywood film music and regional repertoires. Today, it is still controlling
an estimated 25% of India’s music market (Hu 2017). Universal Music
group is the leader for international music, focusing on marketing western
and other International repertoire (Hu 2017). Most of the international
majors have diversified their operations into related media sectors, such as
film production, broadcasting and retailing operations, to the extent that
music revenue typically accounts for a minority share of their total revenue
(Mukharjee 2002). Significantly, as Arpita Mukherjee explains, the entry
of global players changed the existing distribution and marketing system
and expedited the growth and absorption of new technologies (Mukharjee
2002, p. 36)
The early liberalization period was marked by the arrival of digital
sound recording in India, due to the lifting of import duties and restric-
tions. These technological developments, along with the arrival of digital
audio production software, remediated processes of composition and
recording and, consequently, the working lives of recording studios and
musicians (see Booth 2017). For instance, digital synthesizers removed
the need for orchestras and pushed those musicians to find opportunities
112 C. ITHURBIDE

outside the studio system. New technologies also made small scale home
studios affordable. Subsequently, the new possibilities offered by the
development of internet and social networks (Facebook, Instagram,
YouTube) in the late 2000s further transformed the production process,
creating both opportunities and problems. Digital music gained popular-
ity at the user level with the mobile phone boom in the first half of the
2000s, when recorded songs turned into a wide range of telephonic func-
tions especially ring tones and ring-back tones. Now, almost anyone with
basic recording equipment could make music and digitally distribute it to
a wide audience, the remaining challenge for artists was the question of
monetization. While digital technologies have dramatically changed the
creation and production phases of music, the impact on the distribution
and dissemination phases has also been significant. Suresh Thangiah, for-
mer manager at Times Music explains:

Organization structures have changed completely with the shift in medium

from physical to digital media—content delivery, content marketing meth-
ods are different and the functions/profile of employees has changed signifi-
cantly. While once we had big physical sales teams etc., we now have content
delivery, digital marketing and sales teams. The artists themselves are put-
ting great effort into developing and managing their fans on Facebook, their
twitter accounts, Instagram. (Interview)

Extending the changes brought about by cassettes and CD players,

mobile phones have become the primary medium for consuming music
today. This transition to digital music was accelerated by the lowering cost
of mobile phones, manufactured mainly in China, and subscription charges
falling sharply, making digital music affordable for a larger part of the
population. A major inflection point came with the launch of a new tele-
phone operator, Reliance Jio, in September 2015 offering free 4G data
services and fostering a dramatic increase in the number of mobile users
(Khan 2017). The subsequent launch of low-cost smartphones by Jio and
Airtel in 2017 (retailing at less than 30$) further enabled deeper penetra-
tion of internet services and digital media content (EY 2018, p. 105).
Reliance Jio benefited from the official Digital India policy, which aims to
transform India into a digital society and a knowledge-based economy
through massive investments in infrastructure expansion, including 4G
and 5G networks. A diverse range of digital music, from Bollywood to
international and indie, became readily accessible in geographically
 6 TELECOM AND TECHNOLOGY ACTORS REPOSITIONING MUSIC… 113

isolated districts and larger metropolitan areas. Regional musical produc-

ers also gained access to a wider consumer market furnished by networks
of migrant workers (Kumar 2015).
The reconfiguration of recording studios with the arrival of digital
sounds and programming software represented a shift in the technologiza-
tion of creation and production processes. In the subsequent distribution
and dissemination phases of digitalization, we have seen a process of ratio-
nalization across the whole chain of activity, with the emergence of profes-
sionals (art managers, music publisher), services (design, marketing,
investment) and a departmentalization within music companies (produc-
tion, marketing, licensing, sales) in line with global formats. The ideologi-
cal conviction is that, as with developments of digital technologies more
broadly, the music industry will adopt more sophisticated methods of pro-
duction and distribution. However, it should be recalled that in a country
where almost half of GDP and more than three quarters of employment
are based on the informal economy, the music digital sector cannot be
understood in terms of managerial organization (ILO 2017). The infor-
mal ethos remains prevalent in the transaction patterns of all industries,
signifying greater flexibility in business relationships and greater respon-
siveness in the production process (Amelot and Kennedy 2010). The real-
ity remains that signed contracts are rare in India’s creative industries,
typically substituted by oral agreements, and formal and informal systems
are inseparable at all levels of creation, production and distribution. Thus,
although streaming platforms are taken to represent the culmination of
processes of technologization, rationalization and ideologization in the
music industry, this cannot erase the fact that the economic frameworks of
the music industry are still deeply anchored within informal systems.

From Telecom Operators to Technology Players

Since the 2000s, we have witnessed the entry of players from the telecom-
munication and information industries downstream of the music sector.
This has profoundly transformed the music industry and its distribution
infrastructure, along with the roles of various intermediaries and stake-
holders involved in the creation, distribution and consumption of music.
It has created uncertainties about the business models of the industry and
increased complexity in the distribution of revenues (Huang 2014).
Initially, these changes were driven by the arrival of telecom operators
such as Airtel, Vodafone, Idea and Tata Docomo, who offered a range of
114 C. ITHURBIDE

services, including ringtones and mobile radio streaming services, bundled

with their subscription packages. These offerings quickly positioned them
as key players in the digital music industry, to the point that, in 2009,
Bharti Airtel’s deputy CEO, Sanjay Kapoor, claimed that Airtel had
become “the biggest music company of India” with revenues higher than
those of the oldest Indian music label Saregama (Pahwa 2009). Airtel
aggregates and sells music from many Indian labels and music companies,
including Saregama and T-Series, and also from film companies such as
Yash Raj Films. This new scenario saw major music companies enter into
various agreements with telecommunications companies, whose services
enabled them to monetize their catalogues of Hindi and regional music
built up over decades (Booth 2017). As they expanded their activity into
digital music, however, telecom companies operating in India founded
their own music platforms: Vodafone India launched Vodafone Music
(2013), followed by Bharti Airtel with the Wynk music app (2015), Idea
Cellular with Idea Music Lounge and Reliance Jio with Jio Music (2017).
The main music streaming platforms that developed outside the tele-
com industry were Hungama (2000) and Gaana (2010), both owned by
domestic media and Internet companies, (respectively, Hungama Digital
Media Entertainment and Times Internet). There was also the start-up
Dhingana founded by twin brothers and Bollywood fans Swapnil and
Shenal Shinde in 2007. Dhingana primarily relied upon US-Indian ven-
ture capital, before being acquired by US-based social jukebox Rdio in
2014 (Mishra 2013). Saavn, an Indian-focused music streaming platform
headquartered in New York, was also driven by international venture capi-
tal (variously, Indian [Bertelsmann India Investments], US [Tiger Global,
Liberty Media, Senvest Management LLC, Mousse Partners], UK
[Steadview Capital] and Hong Kong [Quilvest]) (Verma 2015). In March
2018, Reliance Industries signed a deal to merge JioMusic with Saavn, a
combination seen as a threat by competitors. Popular e-ticketing platform
BookMyShow also launched its own music platform, Jukebox, in 2017,
with the aim to become a “360-degree entertainment destination” to
quote Aditya Kuber, Associate Vice President-Audio Entertainment,
BookMyShow (Kala 2017). A few months earlier, BookMyShow acquired
the tech platform Nfusion to pursue the development of its audio enter-
tainment offerings. This move occurred in a context where one of
BookMyShow’s main competitors, Insider.in, previously owned by the
entertainment company Only Much Louder (OML), had been acquired
 6 TELECOM AND TECHNOLOGY ACTORS REPOSITIONING MUSIC… 115

by India’s leading e-money platform Paytm, allowing it to become a seri-

ous challenger in the event ticketing business (Mukherjee and Pahwa 2017).
The development of “indigenous” music streaming platform, although
often backed up by foreign investments, highlights the increasing size and
significance of internet and e-commerce companies operating downstream
of the music industry. At the same time, Indian platforms quickly found
themselves in competition with major international players seeking to
position themselves in a promising music market of 480 million internet
users. Apple Music arrived first (2015), followed by Google Play Music
(2016), Amazon Music (2018) and Spotify (2019). Like the telco compa-
nies, Apple, Google and Amazon use music content as a “call product” to
sell their other services or products. Unlike Indian music platforms, the
major international player in digital music, Swedish platform Spotify,
draws its revenues primarily from paying subscribers. Nonetheless, in a
context where international music represents less than 20% of the domes-
tic Indian market, transnational players have had to Indianize their cata-
logue through expensive licence acquisitions, as we will see in the next
section. It is also important to note that the largest platform for music
continues to be YouTube, whose business model differs significantly from
the telecom companies and music platform companies, as it remains largely
based on user-generated content (UGC). Since its 2008 launch in India,
YouTube has become the catch-all platform for UGC and free consump-
tion of TV and film, music, earning it an audience of 180 million. More
than a third of the entire Indian internet user base of 460 million visit the
platform each month. Consequently, YouTube is where the vast majority
of digital music consumption takes place (Peto 2017).
The development of international streaming platforms has also bene-
fited from a favourable legislative framework, more specifically a regula-
tory policy in favour of foreign investment. While many countries, such as
Canada and European Union countries, implemented restrictions on the
entry of foreign ownership in their domestic markets with the develop-
ment of internet-based services, in India, a contrary choice was made to
attract foreign funding in the media and entertainment (M&E) sector
(Mattelart 2005; Mukharjee 2002). More recently, as part of the Make in
India programme, further liberalization and tariff relaxation has been pro-
moted as a growth-driver for the M&E sector (Make in India 2018).
Through facilitating business opportunities for foreign players and FDI,
India aims to position itself as a destination for manufacturing and ser-
vices, primarily in order to create additional employment opportunities
116 C. ITHURBIDE

and ensure an orderly growth in the sector and a diversity of players. This
stance positions India on the side of free trade proponents, who com-
monly argue that liberalization of M&E markets fosters foreign invest-
ment, encourages adoption of new technologies and lead to a more
competitive domestic industry (Bouquillion and Ithurbide forthcoming).
Certainly, the music market structure that has been emerging over the past
two decades has seen a diversification of its players, both Indian and
international.
There are two broad categories of players: the historical cultural industry
players and the ICT players. The former are historical players of the music
industry, encompassing music companies (Saregama, Indian Record
Company—INRECO, Times Music, Venus Music, Zee Music Company),
young labels (Azadi Records, Strumm, Kadak Apple Records), film music
rights owners, such as Yash Raj or T-Series. Their activity is essentially based
on the creation, production and sale of musical content. They remain pow-
erful players, due to their copyright assets, but their distribution has increas-
ingly become dependent upon digital platforms which are owned and
operated by the second category of players. This latter category of players
brings together the internet, telecommunications and consumer electron-
ics industries, whose main activity and expertise is not based on music. In
this context, music distribution is part of a larger diversification of their
main activities, and music offerings are designed to draw more consumers
into their main and more profitable network service activity. In the case of
the global tech giants, these are unquestionably much more important eco-
nomic and financial entities than the historical players of the music indus-
try. The activities of these ICT players has steadily evolved from the
distribution of musical content into production, thereby appropriating an
increasingly important part of the activities and incomes of the first cate-
gory of players (Bouquillion et al. 2013). Similarly, the main music plat-
forms developed in India have been either directly created by Indian Telco
providers (Jio Music, Airtel-Wink) or by internet and e-commerce compa-
nies, both Indian based (e.g. Hungama, Gaana-Times, Jukebox) and inter-
national (e.g. YouTube, Amazon Music Prime, Google Play Music).

Market Structure of Music Platforms

While telecom and ICT players have made important contributions to the
development of the music market, they have also repositioned power rela-
tions within the industry. In terms of content, digital music platforms have
 6 TELECOM AND TECHNOLOGY ACTORS REPOSITIONING MUSIC… 117

to build their catalogue by acquiring music from music and film compa-
nies who are the copyright holders. To obtain a licence, platforms must
pay global minimum guarantee, generally of 1–3 years, and agree per-­
stream revenues with the music labels. The latest entrant Amazon Music
pursued a blistering acquisition policy, signing with the five major Indian
companies in two months and, more significantly, with the Indian
Performing Right Society (IPRS) to gain access to more than a million
titles across multiple languages, eras and genres of Indian music. This suite
of deals was described by IPRS as “one the biggest of its nature in the digi-
tal content publishing in India” (Elias 2018). Through such deals, music
companies, labels and publishing houses have been able to compensate for
the loss of CD sales, with the acquisition of their content by the largest
streaming services offering them minimum guarantees, and sometimes an
advance, on their revenues. According to an International Federation of
the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) report, streaming revenues from digital
music now amount to over 91% of the Indian recorded music industry
revenues (2017).
However, according to Nikhil Pahwa, there are two key problems: the
first is a lack of standardization in licensing deals, which enables labels and
copyright societies to hold power over multiple platforms, while the sec-
ond is exclusivity of licensing, where one player corners the rights to a
particular music catalogue (2014). In the former case, a lack of standard-
ization prevents start-ups from licensing music easily. In the latter case,
international players such as Amazon and Netflix have been insisting on
exclusive content deal with production houses (Jha 2017). T-Series had
granted exclusivity rights to Hungama to stream songs from its catalogue
on its mobile app for several years (Balanarayan 2014). Spotify has already
been criticized for pursuing exclusivity deals during the first two weeks of
artists’ new album release and for directly licensing artists and paying them
advances, as a music label would do. These practices have created frictions
with international majors and contributed to delay Spotify licensing in
India (Ingham 2018). Nonetheless, Apple Music has been acquiring a
large volume of exclusive content (Bhatia 2018).
Two major trends have emerged in the acquisition strategies of music
platforms. The first is the regionalization of catalogues in a context where
small towns are increasingly connected to digital platforms. This has been
achieved through the acquisition of a diverse range of regional music
across film and non-film genres. A second trend is the production of origi-
nal content by the streaming platforms, with Saavn and Gaana being
118 C. ITHURBIDE

among the first platforms to launch their own original content in 2017,
followed by Jukebox. By doing so, they differentiate their offering in a
very competitive market. Between September and October 2017, Gaana
Bollywood’s top five tracks generated 27 million views, while Gaana
Originals top six tracks came close with 20 million streams. Saavn and
Jukebox also began investing in the production of original music, distribu-
tion and management of artists, essentially from the independent scene.
This strategy, however, is not adopted by all players in the platforms, as
declared by Steve Boom Amazon Music Vice President: “Labels really play
an important role in the world and it’s not in our interest to replace them”
(2017). Nonetheless, there are also advantages for artists as they benefit
from streaming companies’ ability to leverage their algorithms to ensure
that their music reaches relevant audiences (Salman 2017).
The feature that stands out across the platforms is their rationalization
of the distribution of music. First of all, there is an in-built curation of
their offerings into regional languages and also into musical genres
(Bollywood, Rock, Ghazals, Devotional, Hip Hop) and sub-genres
(Upbeat Bollywood, Bollywood Love, Bollywood Workout, Soft Rock,
Hark Rock, Hindi Rock, Folk Rock etc.). GPS localization through users’
smartphones has enabled features such as “local favourites”, which selects
popular music from the immediate locality of the consumer, or a “Hot
50” list of the most trending hits from your city. Algorithms are also used
for planning the organization of artist tours, where managers can draw on
platform user data to map the largest concentrations of listeners. Streaming
platform data is also used to understand more broadly consumer profiles
and behaviour in order to suggest targeted music content. This also
enables the streaming platforms to sell higher volumes of ad spaces to cli-
ents seeking particular audience profiles. This evolution towards a pre-
dominant function and tacit acceptance of digital technologies as tools of
monitoring, modelling and exploiting music consumers of musical con-
tent has produced little debate in the industry so far. Thus there is an ideo-
logical paradigm fostered by the adoption of digital technologies, one that
disregards issues such as data privacy or “filter bubble” effects for the
consumer.
This technological and commercial experimentation has triggered
uncertainties about sustainable and profitable business models for music
industry players. Currently, there are three models for streaming plat-
forms: (1) free music streaming financed by advertising and by investors,
(2) bundled telecom offers and (3) premium paid subscriptions without
 6 TELECOM AND TECHNOLOGY ACTORS REPOSITIONING MUSIC… 119

advertising. The first model, free music streaming, is financed by advertis-

ing and by venture capital investors. For example, in 2015, Saavn
announced $100 million in investments, including new international
investors, including Quilvest, a Hong-Kong-based investment fund, and
Lion Tree Advisor, New York (Shashidhar 2017). In 2016, the Chinese
largest smartphone maker Xiaomi provided $25 million investment to
Hungama. In February 2018, Gaana received $115 million from the
internet giant Tencent (ToI 2018). The second model, used by Telecoms
operators, provides their customers with access to unlimited music stream-
ing from the platform catalogues, but not download rights. Jio Music,
however, goes further by offering free streaming and downloads to all Jio
customers. Thus, the volume of music data is much higher on Jio Music.
According to estimates from MediaNama, for one hour a day listening
over for a month, 4572 MB are consumed on average on Jio Music against
900 MB on Gaana. This reflects the importance of data consumption in
this model, as an underlying profit source for telephone operators. The
third model of “Premium” services, with monthly or yearly paid ad-free
subscriptions is only really seen on international platforms (such as Apple
Music, Amazon Music). Elsewhere, the trend has been the “Freemium”
model, which combines limited free streaming with paid access to the lat-
est catalogue. This reflects the interest of music companies seeking to
impose limitations on free consumption and to encourage more users to pay.
These business models all reflect interdependency between markets for
music and telecoms, and between content and data markets. Thus, even if
Amazon Prime Music India is not profitable on the basis of subscriptions,
it aims first and foremost to draw users into the larger e-commerce plat-
form which is the real source of profits. Thus, musical content is a loss-­
leader for their e-commerce business, as well as being an important source
of consumer data for guiding operations across other service domains
(e-commerce, video, fashion). For Atul Churamani, control is in the hands
of platforms who have different interests from those of the music and label
companies (interview). At the time of physical business, music shops only
interest was to sell the music, Churamani explains: “Today with digital
platforms as the shop, it is the shop that determine the price of the album
or song, not the label and their agenda is to get the highest number of
people on the platform to sell spaces to advertisers and attract venture
capital. So they don’t mind pushing the price of the song down or even
give music for free, because the highest number of subscribers they have,
the more they will strike deals with advertisers and investors”. Suresh
120 C. ITHURBIDE

Thangiah has another perspective, explaining that “while it is true that not
everyone has the opportunity to sit at the table of negotiation with the
major platforms, a number of agreements are being reached regarding the
amount of payment, periodicity of reports, etc. As a start-up (Label
Strumm), we had limited bargaining power with the platforms. However,
we find that by aligning ourselves with what digital music services want we
can achieve results” (interview).
There are important differences between the fortunes of labels that
arise from scale. For the smaller labels, the payout-per-stream could be a
fraction of what is offered to the major players. Consequently, more and
more smaller labels are approaching the music digital platforms through
aggregators, such as Believe Digital, who combine the catalogues of
smaller labels to achieve scale and better deals. A former employee of Sony
Music explained that some labels and music companies charge exorbitant
minimum guarantee fees from streaming platforms when renewing the
rights exploitation licences. However, for the platforms, revenues from
song downloads are fairly low, typically not even 50% of the minimum
guarantee amount (Pahwa 2014). For the labels, there is also diversifica-
tion of licence rights (for website, mobile apps etc.) which, combined,
become a greater source of income. The larger point is that sources of
revenue other than music consumption are indispensable to streaming
platform models, and from this we can assume that the amount trickling
down to the artists (musicians, composers, lyricists) is even more negligi-
ble. The attendant question is how much of the money raised by new ICT
players, through music selling, data sharing or ad revenues, is being put
back on content production business? Whereas historical musical players
primarily reinvested profits in music events and content production, the
profits of ICT players are invested in advertising, technology, partner ven-
tures and expansion of their sales force and consumer acquisition strategies.
Clearly, with the platformization of India’s music market, new power
relations have emerged between historical players of the music industries
and the ICT players, and also amongst each category of players. While
Gaana and Saavn have operated at a loss in terms of music revenues, they
have been sustained by adds, venture capitalist funding and larger corpo-
rate backing (Huang 2014). At the same time, we can assume that the aim
of players like Amazon and YouTube is not to make profit out of music but
to incorporate users into their wider commercial offerings, and to mone-
tize user meta-data and analytics. In such highly competitive market, many
players may not be able to survive and will be facing two choices: to raise
 6 TELECOM AND TECHNOLOGY ACTORS REPOSITIONING MUSIC… 121

more money to stay in the competition or to sell. Times Internet Limited

opted for the first option and infused fresh capital of INR 2.48 billion into
Gaana in February 2018 (Peermohamed 2018). Other Indian music
streaming platforms have already folded, such as Dhingana and Flipkart’s
online music store Flyte which lasted only one year after its creation.
Processes of merger and acquisition has already begun, with examples
such as the acquisition of Saavn by Reliance Jio, prompting Airtel to tie up
with Amazon. Amidst this larger setting, the whole digital music market is
becoming a play within an oligopoly game.

Genre Diversity and Creator Revenues

A number of challenges have arisen as streaming platforms have estab-
lished themselves as the structuring element of the music industries.
Among these, the preservation of genre diversity and the remuneration of
creators have received particular attention. The 2005 UNESCO
Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural
Expressions was intended to protect and foster national musical creation
and production. Yet, the development of internet-based music platforms
to date appears to have escaped most national policies. The debate has
finally been reopened on the regulation of digital content markets in
favour of guaranteeing local music genres and diversity. The consequences
of the platformization of the music industry on this diversity of musical
genres are not necessarily consensual among the players of the Indian
industry. Compared to other countries, the question of the protection of
domestic musical genres from foreign competition has been quite margin-
alized in the Indian national debate. Indeed, there is no real competition
with American or Anglophone music as the market remains focused on
Indian music both in Hindi and in other regional languages. Hence, there
is no minimum quotas for domestic music on radio as observed in other
countries. Most of the actors interviewed were against the setting up quo-
tas, which were perceived as unnecessary constraints. Even the players who
felt that the diversity of music genre had diminished stated that they did
not believe that such top-down regulation, if it was passed by the govern-
ment, could be implemented in the music industry.
In India, while Bollywood music still captures up to 95% of the physical
market, its share of streaming in services is only 60%, which is leaving
more room for international, Indipop and regional repertoires (Hu 2017).
Prashan Agarwal, Chief Operating Officer of Gaana, explained that
122 C. ITHURBIDE

international music is the fastest growing category on its platform. Artists

and small labels confirmed during interviews that platforms allowed mar-
ginal music genres (jazz, blues, funk, electro) to be made accessible. Thus,
both international and independent music appear to be the biggest benefi-
ciaries of music streaming platforms. However, others players argued that,
with the switch from analogue to digital, the diversity of music had been
greatly diminished. “That’s because music platforms are in a race for sub-
scribers and focus on mass content”, says Strumm Entertainment’s
Thangiah. “Many of the smaller musical genres that have worked well in
the CD era are now ignored in the digital music space—this includes
Indian classical music, devotional music, ghazals, etc.” (interview). The
rationalization of music listening through algorithms also tends to channel
listeners into musical genres they already know and like, instead of open-
ing them to other music experiences. This consequence of algorithmic
guidance, widely known as the “filter bubble”, highlights the risks of trap-
ping consumers within homogeneous bubbles of content and preventing
them to grow their musical awareness and learning (Pariser 2011).
Diversity, as an appeal strategy, can “serve as a lure for an organization of
production and distribution that pushes the opposite to the standardiza-
tion of behavior and consumption” (Benhamou 2006, p. 254). Hence, we
must look beyond the diversity of the platforms’ musical genre offer at the
shopfront and consider the low consumption diversity of individual con-
sumers (Joux 2016).
In regard to the evolution of intellectual property rights and, more
specifically, creators’ copyright and remuneration, international players
have been putting increasing pressure in India to enforce the Berne and
WIPO conventions. The remuneration of creative talent and transfer of
value seems to remain a blind spot of Indian digital music market, despite
a significant amendment to the Copyright Act in 2012. Previously, as
music was essentially created as part of a commission for a film, composers,
writers or singers were paid a fixed price for their creation and their rights
belonged to the film producer, considered as the first owner of song. The
Indian Copyright Act, originally passed in 1957, did not call into question
the convention that the first ownership of the rights belongs to the film
producer of film. It was not until the rise of mobile phones and the success
of ringback tunes that artists started to claim their share of the revenue
generated from their creation. This long-running contest resulted in an
amendment to the Copyright Act in 2012 that designated the composer
and authors as the first owners of rights and beneficiaries of royalties that
 6 TELECOM AND TECHNOLOGY ACTORS REPOSITIONING MUSIC… 123

cannot be transferred. There are many limitations to this amendment,

however. First of all, many problems in enforcement remain, especially
because of the lack of clarity on the distribution of profits between artists,
composers and the other rights owners (music companies or film
producers).
A former employee of Sony Music explained that “after the 2012
Amendment, the contracts signed with artists were modified accordingly.
Officially, an artists couldn’t assign his rights in perpetuity but in reality
nothing much changed” (interview). This highlights the continuing dom-
ination of industrial hierarchies over the law and the inherent difficulty of
copyright enforcement a system where formal and informal contracts are
tightly interwoven. In addition, pressure continues to be put on artists to
accept fixed-price work contracts by adding an exception clause in which
they renounce their royalties. Manojna Yeluri, lawyer and founder of the
organization Artistik License, which advises artists on their rights and con-
tracts, explains that the 2012 Amendment mainly concerned Bollywood
film music composers. It did not really spread throughout the music
industry. Few artists really claim their new rights for three reasons: (1) a
lack of knowledge of their rights, (2) the fact that these questions are not
talked about in the schools of music and (3) because young artists have no
bargaining power over labels or platforms (Yeluri, interview 2018). Over
the same period, the sale of physical formats has been almost totally
replaced by streaming and downloads on platforms, and the price per song
for creators has dropped dramatically. Musicians who were interviewed
tended to feel this price drop was justified because of the greater reach
provided by the digital platform compared to CD and the opportunity to
diversity their sources of income.
For their part, platforms are prepared to put content online for free in
order to increase their number of views, and hence advertising revenue. It
is primarily labels and record companies who denounce a dangerous model
that has fostered a generation that believes music is for free, as Neeraj
Kalyan, president of T-Series explained (interview). Discussions about
putting in place sustainable revenue models for music streaming platforms
are struggling to progress in a context of increasingly imbalanced power
relations between platforms, telecoms providers and music companies. As
in the case of the ring tones affair in the late 1990 leading to the Copyright
Act Amendment of 2012, only the mobilization of artists for their rights
and a fresh decision from the Court of Justice could lead to effective regu-
lations on the price of online musical content. In the context of a
124 C. ITHURBIDE

liberalized economy expected to operate through self-regulation, there is

little expectation of government action to regulate the price of content or
the relationship between vastly different kinds of players. Consequently,
the proliferation and consolidation of streaming platforms reinforces the
importance of physical venues for performances and concerts, especially in
urban centres, which are now the main source of income for recording
artists.

Conclusion
This study of the platformization of India’s music industry has empha-
sized the “inter-sectoral relations” with other industries and, specifically,
over the course of three decades, with consumer electronics, then infor-
mation technology, and now telecommunications. I have noted the pres-
ence and significance of transnational firms and their role in introducing
technological disruptions. Currently, it is mainly ICT and telecoms com-
panies that are reshaping India’s musical industry, as is the case globally
(Hesmondhalgh and Meier 2018). The same power struggles observed at
global scale are at play in India, with ICT actors increasingly capturing
historical music companies. All of the dedicated music companies are now
in some form of collaboration or dependency with ICT players who are
expanding into cultural content as a loss leader for their main offering.
Indian streaming platforms (Saavn, Gaana) are in competition with their
international counterparts (Spotify), but also with historical players of the
music industry (T-Series, Sony), and the wider interests of super-platforms
(Apple, Amazon, Jio). Musical production is clearly evolving towards a
concentration of interests, and this has implications for the diversity of
musical genres and the realization of creator’s revenue. Despite a strength-
ening of the legal protection of artists’ copyright with the 2012 Amendment
of the Copyright Act, issues of regulatory implementation and enforce-
ment remain a concern. In an essentially self-regulating market, only a
minority of (typically smaller) players are in favour of more stringent leg-
islation for the giants of the internet and e-commerce and a fairer remu-
neration of creators. In the absence of coherent cultural policies and state
regulation in India, one can only wonder about the likely future of cultural
industries that are being left in the hands of the major actors of the ICT
sector, including Google, Apple and Amazon, who have acquired domi-
nant positions over end-user access to cultural products
 6 TELECOM AND TECHNOLOGY ACTORS REPOSITIONING MUSIC… 125

Acknowledgements The author would like to thank all the artists and music pro-
fessionals interviewed for their time. Special thanks are due to Kenneth Hopkins,
Mae Mariyam Thomas and Emmanuelle de Decker, for our passionate and fruitful
discussions and for recommendations to several industry professionals during this
fieldwork.

Interviews
Blaise Fernandes, Indian Music Industry (IMI), 24 November 2017,
Mumbai; Samron Jude, Musician, 1 February 2018, Mumbai; Atul
Churamani, Turnkey Music & Publishing, 2 February 2018, Mumbai;
Achille Forler, Ex CEO Universal Music, 20 February 2018, Mumbai;
Neeraj Kalyan, T-series, 23 February 2018, Delhi; Manojna Yeluri, Artistik
License, 28 February 2018, New Delhi; Suresh Thangiah, Strumm
Entertainment, 12 April 2018, Mumbai; Dhruv Anand, Anand & Anand,
24 April 2018, New Delhi; Karan Malhotra, Music Composer and Producer,
26 April 2018, Mumbai; Ex-employee, Sony Music India, 4 May 2018,
Mumbai; Tejas Menon, Kaddak Apple Record, 12 May 2018, Mumbai.

Funding
The author received financial support for her research from the Laboratory
of Information and Communication Sciences (LabSIC) and the Laboratory
of Excellence Cultural Industries and Artistic Creation (LabEx ICCA),
Paris 13 University.

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 CHAPTER 7

Industrial and Financial Structures of

Over-the-Tops (OTTs) in India

Philippe Bouquillion

The purpose of this chapter is to bring out the challenges of deploying

over-the-top (OTT) offers in the audio-visual sector in India. To delimit
its scope, a first precision must be provided about the notion of OTTs and
a second clarification must relate to the components of the audio-visual
field that will be addressed. First, OTTs operate over telecommunications
networks, and therefore enable them to operate over national regulatory
frameworks, especially Broadcasting Acts. Being important consumers of
bandwidth, OTTs have typically conflicted with telecommunications oper-
ators, sometimes even leading to their streaming being blocked. But by
the end of 2010, in many countries, including to a certain extent India,
the different actors involved seemed to have reached to a level of consen-
sus. Second, in this chapter we focus on “professionally” produced audio-­
visual OTT suppliers, that is to say, commercially produced content
variously remunerated by the OTT platform, and therefore not user-­
generated content (UGC) audio-visual content.

P. Bouquillion (*)
University of Paris XIII, Villetaneuse, France
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 129

A. Athique, V. Parthasarathi (eds.), Platform Capitalism in India,
Global Transformations in Media and Communication Research - A
Palgrave and IAMCR Series,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44563-8_7
130 P. BOUQUILLION

How has Indian capitalism in the audio-visual cultural industries

deployed OTTs? This question is at the heart of the chapter. Our hypoth-
esis is that, as an instance of industrial movement, OTTs can also be appre-
hended from the point of view of the insertion of capitalist logics within
the existing media industries. Before being able to support this hypothesis,
it is necessary to specify how we will consider the relationship of cultural
industries to capitalism and what we mean by such an “insertion” within
capitalism. We will be inspired by an approach of the political economy of
communication (PEC) where scholars have put forward a specific concep-
tion of capitalism. This differs from other approaches such as that of the
creative industries and economy in which capitalism is viewed in a broader
sense (such as Throsby 2000; Caves 2000). Capitalism is then extended to
the entire economy and many authors emphasize the deepening of the
market and financial dimensions of the economy. In contrast, in PEC,
capitalism is conceived as the superior sphere of the economy, a restricted
sphere in which power, the ability to define major orientations and also
profits are concentrated.
One stream of scholars in PEC have found theoretical reference in the
works of Fernand Braudel. Although not a scholar of the creative indus-
tries, his work allows us to engage with the differences, if not oppositions,
between capitalism and market economy. I distinguish these two registers
of the economy, one being considered superior and the other as inferior.
The activities of capitalism are accessible only to a very small number of
actors, who alone have the information, the know-how, and the financial
and logistical capacities necessary to carry out large-scale operations
(Braudel 1979, p. 493) The risks involved are considerable; but the poten-
tial profits, because of the absence of a competitive market situation, are
just as important. Thus, the reference to Braudel also allows us to analyse
transnationalization since capitalism as we envisage is built on a global
scale, that of the world economy. Thus, Braudelian scholars of PEC have
considered the culture industries developing in a capitalist logic. Moreover,
these industries today are seen to lie at the heart of capitalism, perhaps
even one of its privileged domains.
Focusing on the insertion of the cultural industries in capitalism helps
to underline that these activities, because of their specificities, can escape
the market economy—understood in the Braudelian sense as activities
regulated by effective competition and low rates of profit. Cultural indus-
tries, or at least some part of them, are the most speculative or the most
powerful belonging to the higher sphere of the economy, capitalism,
 7 INDUSTRIAL AND FINANCIAL STRUCTURES OF OVER-THE-TOPS (OTTS)… 131

where dominant positions and power struggles are extremely strong. The
initial observation of PEC scholars, especially Miège (1984, 1989), is that
capitalism is constantly seeking to find new spaces for the valuation of
capital. For this, it must extend to areas previously occupied in whole or in
part by non-market institutions, or create new spaces of production. Thus,
considering the integration of culture industries into capitalism underlines
how the transformation occurring in these industries are permanent, vari-
ous, and difficult to predict.
Of course, the reflection on the insertion of cultural industries into
capitalism has been renewed from the 2000s, when the deployment of
digital technology gradually unfolded. Thanks to the deployment of digi-
tal technology with all the new tools, devices and services that they consti-
tute, new spaces for capitalism developed. No other social space has offered
in these last decades so many opportunities to capitalism. The question
that arises since the beginning of the 2000s is: whether, with the deploy-
ment of digital technology, cultural industries are always favoured and
considered as an activity at the heart of capitalism? Or if, on the contrary,
they are put at the service of the industries of communication, which
would then have become one of the main sectors of contemporary
capitalism?
It has to be recalled that the culture and communication industries are
two very different sets of industries although in strong interaction. The
cultural industries are activities that relate to the industrialized production
of content with a large symbolic dimension: namely book, information
press, recorded music, audio-visual and video games. The turnover of
these companies is mainly and directly coming from such productions and
contents. On the other hand, communication industries gather a hetero-
geneous set of activities, ranging from telecommunications, consumer
goods, web industries and software. They therefore include the tech giants
(Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft), which have in common
their wider dealings with transport, storage and processing of data. In
other words, unlike cultural industries, the core business of communica-
tion industries is not in the creation and production of cultural content,
even though for the past two decades, they have increasingly entered into
the economy of cultural productions. The size and the economic and
financial power of these actors are also very different. The biggest players
in the cultural industries are much less powerful than the major players in
the communication industries. Later, we will give quantitative data on
active industrial players in India showing this great disparity.
132 P. BOUQUILLION

OTTs being one of the main vectors of digitization in the audio-visual

sector, one of the questions asked in this chapter deals with the relationship
between the players in content and those in the communication industries
in the audio-visual sector during the 2010s. Is this relationship the same as
that between the players in content and actors in the communication indus-
tries observed in the press and in recorded music in the 2000s? Dealing
with cultural products enabled the communication industries to assert
themselves against their competitors, as we will discuss later in the Indian
case. PEC has two main advantages in order to analyse the issues of OTTs
in India. First, it allows to articulate a reflection on the links between OTT
market dynamics and the dynamics of capitalism, without necessarily con-
sidering that competitive dynamics and insertion capitalism go together.
Second, thanks to the concept of world economy (Braudel 1979), it is pos-
sible to think the insertion of the OTT in transnational industrial and finan-
cial relations. A world economy is “a part of the planet, economically
autonomous, capable for the most part of self-­sufficiency and to which its
links and internal trade confer a certain organic unity” (Braudel 1979,
p. 12). The world economy is organized around a centre from which the
exchange of capital, goods and workers is organized. Trade in the world
economy is built in favour of the centre, while the rest of the world econ-
omy is made up of different concentric circles less and less favoured as they
are far from the centre. This Braudelian approach does not oppose the
research referring to the notion of “platform capitalism” (Srnicek 2016;
Sundarajan 2016). Rather, it helps to reorient and clarify the meaning of
these proposals in relation to two central ideas.
Thus, on the one hand, we insist on the fact that pure and perfect com-
petition is not the rule in the higher spheres of capitalism, while on the
other hand we can consider that transnational exchanges are structured by
powerful power relations. One of the objectives of this contribution is to
identify the new balance of power created by the deployment of OTTs,
both between the various types of industrial actors and between the terri-
tories participating in transnational exchanges.

OTTs as a Market Regulation or an Insertion

of Capitalism

This subtitle refers to the Braudelian problematic that distinguishes mar-

ket economy and capitalism, as recalled earlier. If the second option is
confirmed, it will be appropriate to characterize the strategies of capitalism
 7 INDUSTRIAL AND FINANCIAL STRUCTURES OF OVER-THE-TOPS (OTTS)… 133

at the end of 2010 in India in OTT. Are these strategies comparable to

those at work previously since the beginning of 2000 when the dispersion
of digital technology began? Or can we observe specificities related to the
particularities of OTTs or the Indian case? Our hypothesis is that the
deployment of OTTs accentuates the insertion of these industries into
capitalism but in a quite specific way. In particular we presume that OTTs
are offering a new opportunity for the actors in the cultural industries to
control for their benefit the articulation between cultural contents and the
digital without being vassalized by the actors of the communication indus-
tries. The links between the deployment of OTTs and the integration of
the Indian culture and communication industries into capitalism can be
assessed on three levels: (1) OTTs offering new spaces for the valuation of
capital, (2) OTTs offering opportunities for industrial actors to renew
their stakes and (3) the display of oligopolistic tendencies in the overall
OTT market. Regarding the first level, thanks to the development of
OTTs, a new sub-segment within audio-visual offers got created and con-
tributed to the emergence of new areas for the valuation of capital. In a
very short time, the OTT market grew in turnover, in users, and in the
“quantity” of use, measured in viewing hours.
It is difficult to evaluate precisely the size of the OTT market since few
quantitative data are available, and much of this being disputed. Figures
tend to reflect the interests of certain actors who have an interest in pre-
senting an optimistic vision of their activity. Both advertising and subscrip-
tion revenues grew during 2017, by 34% and 262% respectively (Ernst &
Young 2019, p. 108). Viewership of online videos online grew by 25%
from 2017 with regional consumption driving this growth, albeit this
includes viewership of UGCs (Ernst & Young 2019, p. 112). These fig-
ures concern a larger universe than our immediate analysis, as they include
all digital services, including for instance music streaming. But this growth
is also uneven due to uneven levels of broadband penetration beyond the
top eight cities, which led to average time per user coming down. Similarly,
the percentage of consumers who pay is abysmally low, some 5% and 1%
for video and audio respectively (Ernst & Young 2019, p. 120). This per-
haps explains why the offer on digital audio-visual platforms are not in
itself profitable, as for most OTT platforms—video, news or audio—the
cost of content and customer acquisition continues to be higher than the
revenues earned per customer—despite advertising rates being at much
higher levels than in traditional media” (Ernst & Young 2019, p. 13).
134 P. BOUQUILLION

The industrial stakes of OTTs are not limited to the direct earnings they
generate. Although not attaining breakeven point, the overall momentum
in the consumption of a host of online services (social networks, music
streaming, etc.) has pushed household spending and advertising expendi-
tures in favour of digital media. This explains the growth rate in digital
media, of which OTTs are a dynamics component, being double that of
the average for the entire media and entertainment economy (Ernst &
Young 2019, p. 10). Thus, OTTs seem to play a vital role in the larger
movement of digitization and consequently, in the incremental expansion
of capitalism in the Indian culture and communication industries. In our
second level of analysis of capitalist integration and the expansion of the
Indian culture and communication industries catalysed by OTTs, we look
at the four categories of industrial actors in this space: historical audio-­
visual players, global OTT actors, players from the global communication
industries, and domestic telecommunication operators. In laying this out,
we note how each type of industrial actors in the OTT space tends to
extract value differently.
Many of actors in the television and film business have developed OTT
offers. The most important are: Hotstar, subsidiary of the TV network,
StarIndia, now belonging to Disney; Eros Now, a subsidiary of Eros
International, one of the largest in television and film production; Voot, a
joint venture between the US media group Viacom and TV18, controlled
by India’s Reliance Industries; ALTBalaji, a subsidiary of Balaji Telefilms,
an Indian producer and distributor of television and film content; Zee5,
belonging to Zee Entertainment, part of an Indian conglomerate present
in various media industries; HOOQ, a joint venture between Sony
Pictures, Warner Bros. and Singtel; Viu, a subsidiary of a Hong Kong
group active in Information Communication Technology (ICT),
PCCW. Dominant among the former are Hotstar, SonyLiv and Zee5, the
OTT subsidiaries of the leading multi-lingual broadcast networks in India.
Through their OTT subsidiaries, they seek to retain their broadcast audi-
ence and their advertisers (in the latter case by integrating their ad sales
across OTT and linear platforms) (Ernst & Young 2019, p. 24). The prin-
cipal market for content being in Indian languages is an asset for the other
historical audio-visual actor as well—film producers. The consumption of
films on OTTs is clearly dominated by Eros, one of the oldest cinema pro-
duction and distribution companies, with a market share of 69% in 2017
(Ernst & Young 2018, p. 92).
 7 INDUSTRIAL AND FINANCIAL STRUCTURES OF OVER-THE-TOPS (OTTS)… 135

The business of content production has benefited from the high

demand generated by the profusion of rivalling OTT players. This profu-
sion has compelled OTT players to distinguish their original offerings,
though they often are obliged to offer non-exclusive content. Thus, new
entrants with no catalogues purchase rights of existing content while also
produce or commission original content, this latter category having grown
by 1200 hours in 2018 (Ernst & Young 2019, p. 12). OTTs have posi-
tively impacted the wider sphere of the historical audio-visual economy.
For one, the acquisition cost of broadcast rights has increased. The sepa-
rate negotiation of OTTs has benefited content producers. “Instead of
bundling satellite and internet rights for television broadcasters, producers
now see greater monetization in dealing with OTT platforms separately
for digital rights” (Ernst & Young 2019, p. 87). Nevertheless, content
production directly linked to OTTs is still limited; for instance, in cinema
it represents only 10% of revenues (Ernst & Young 2019, p. 76). For the
OTTs, however, this part of revenue is growing fast; in turn, the demand
spurred by them has increased the price of relevant and quality content,
that is, content directed at the Indian market.
The second category of industrial actors in the OTT space are the new
transnational entities in the cultural industries, which are valued mainly
through content, particularly through subscriptions. The main player here
is Netflix, which entered India in January 2016 by offering its transna-
tional catalogue at acceptable prices. Netflix India reached profitability in
its first year of operations (Economic Times 2018). Contrary to its initial
strategy, the company furthered adapted both its pricing and its content to
the specificities of the Indian market. Reed Hastings, Netflix’s CEO,
declared: “We will go from expanding beyond English into Hindi and
then into many more languages, more pricing options, more bundling, all
of those things are possible’ (ibid.). However, contrary to the situation in
Europe, Netflix has not become the dominant OTT offering in India. This
can be explained by the high subscription price, relative to incomes, and
the importance of the possession of the rights of diffusion of contents
produced in India and for an Indian audience.
The third category of industrial actors in the OTT space are global
players in the communication industries, which for now is mainly Amazon.
For Amazon, OTTs are a joint product, part of a bundle services led by its
e-commerce offerings. They can thus afford to offer lower tariff than their
content-centric OTT rivals, which explains Amazon Prime’s annual tariff
of INR 999 being far more appealing that the monthly tariff of INR 500
136 P. BOUQUILLION

by Netflix. The Indian telecom operators constitute the fourth category of

industrial actors. This highly oligopolistic market is comprised of Reliance
Jio, a recent entrant in the telecom space owned India’s large conglomer-
ate Reliance Industries; Bharti Airtel, the first mover in the mobile tele-
com business 25 years ago; and, Vodafone India, owned by the British
Vodafone Plc. Their importance stems from two factors: mobile phones
being the main platform in India for accessing OTT content; and their
ability to offer gratis a basic package of audio-visual content as part of their
connection and data services. Among these three competitors, the con-
glomerate power of Reliance Jio enabled it to slash data tariffs, thereby
making OTT content widely affordable. This enabled JIO to simultane-
ously garner a large share in the market of mobile telecom in general and
of OTTs in particular.
This brings is to the third level of analysis regarding the integration of
the Indian culture and communication industries into capitalism catalysed
by OTTs. Despite the profusion of OTT offers by industrial actors with
different bents, market development on the whole has been accompanied
by oligopolistic tendencies. We emphasize two aspects here: the complex
industrial alliances around the OTT, and the role of the OTT in the con-
solidation within the telecommunications sector. The various OTT players
are connected by relationships of both collaboration and competition. A
situation of “coopetition” has been set up, which while not new has found
a new development with “platformatization”. To a certain extent, these
players form a “system”. This means that their relationships are not only
based, and probably not primarily, on market competition but result from
agreements that are either explicit (contractual) or implicit. The games
between these different actors are complex and these relationships can also
be unstable. The more implicit agreements are regarding their editorial
strategies or their pricing strategies in order to limit frontal competition,
especially between actors whose core business is different, such as content
producers, broadcasters and telecommunication operators.
Similarly, players exchange rights of access to content (to more or less
original content), easier access to networks and access to subscribers.
Players of very different sizes are involved in these competitions/collabo-
rations. Thus, content players, as the film producer Eros International,
may appear small in terms of their turnover or market capitalization com-
pared to other players, including the communication industries players,
but they can stay in the game. This situation of coopetition is not unique
to India. However, in India, these relationships take a specific turn notably
 7 INDUSTRIAL AND FINANCIAL STRUCTURES OF OVER-THE-TOPS (OTTS)… 137

due to the need for OTT platforms to offer Indian content, the insuffi-
cient broadband penetration, the huge pool of subscribers of the Indian
telecom operators, and the centrality of mobile tools in the consumption
of OTT platforms.
As a result, telecommunication operators are at the heart of these net-
works in India, and not global OTT players like Netflix and Amazon. In
fact, at the end of the 2010s, three coopetition networks are in place in a
more or less stable way. The most important and first to be formed is
around Reliance Jio, the first among telcos to develop OTT platforms.
JIO is now associated with Eros Now, Hotstar, ALTBalaji, and Zee5. The
second network is built around Airtel with Eros Now, HOOQ and
SonyLiv, Zee5 and two global players, Netflix and Amazon Prime. The
third set combines Vodafone with Amazon Prime and Netflix, as well as
with Eros Now, ALTBalaji and HOOQ. It is difficult to know all aspects
of these agreements because of industrial secrecy. However, Ernst &
Young have estimated the total paid by telcos for content of all types to
which they allow access: “The amount telcos paid for syndication was
around INR 3.5 to 4 billion in 2018 […] Telco content deals were both
fixed-fee/minimum guarantee deals as well as cost-per-stream deals”
(2019, p. 120).
Reliance Jio has many assets in hand to conclude such agreements.
Having a financially powerful owner, its industrial agreements can be cou-
pled with a capitalistic partnership, such that one reinforces the other. For
instance, in 2018 “Jio’s parent, Reliance Industries Limited (RIL),
acquired a 24.9% stake in Balaji Telefilms, the parent of the OTT player
ALTBalaji” (Khan 2018). RIL also bought a 5% stake in Eros, “after
which Eros Now’s multi-lingual library was made available on Jio TV and
Jio Cinema” (Mitter). Other partnerships relate specifically to content
production services. For example, Viacom entered a multi-picture deal
with Netflix (Ernst & Young 2019, p. 89). Netflix and Amazon entered
into numerous contracts with Indian content providers to obtain exclusive
content. Although such a strategy is not specific to India it gains impor-
tance due to the role of local language content in the OTT market.
Moreover, the informal economy of production in India, together with
the low commissioning costs compared to other countries, allow global
OTT players to obtain content at easier terms. We recall that in Braudel’s
thinking, the non-respect of the rules, brigandage and piracy are not con-
sidered characteristics of a pre-capitalist economy but are at the heart of
138 P. BOUQUILLION

capitalism since they allow the balance of power to develop without legal
constraints.
Finally, oligopolistic tendencies have been considerably reinforced
through Indian telecom giants which have reconfigured OTT offers. The
inflexion point was when Reliance JIO drastically reduced its tariffs, com-
bined with offering low-cost smartphones, since “Jio launched its INR
1,500 smartphone, and Airtel announced a smartphone priced around
INR 2,000–2,500” (Ernst & Young 2018, p. 105). Thus, Jio’s subscrip-
tion offers included both telecom access and free OTT content. Rival tele-
com operators had to adapt to their strategies. As a result, operators’
expenses increased while revenues were constrained by lower prices. Faced
with these pressures, industrial concentration has strengthened, as Bharti
Airtel admitted:

The fiscal year 2017–2018 was a transformational year for the telecom
industry. Because of the brutal price war, there was an unprecedented con-
solidation from 8 operators to only 3 private operators in the market. This
price war also led to a rapid shift in consumer behaviour from voice to enter-
tainment that led to explosion of data usage and ultimately, massive network
investments. (Bharti Airtel, Annual Report 2017–2018, p. 14)

Concluding this first section of the paper, we emphasize that the orga-
nization of the OTT market obeys more to a Braudelian capitalist logic
than to a logic of free market and free competition. Although unprofitable
today, the OTT market is being built as a new area of capital valuation.
Capital is valued differently according to the sectorial affiliations of the
industrial players who find different interests in the OTT business. Thus,
the OTT market forms a system structured by agreements between actors.
Among other things, OTTs offer rest at the heart of recent reorganization
in the telecommunications sector. It concentrated strongly.

OTTs: A New Balance of Power Between Territories

Participating in Transnational Exchanges?
Under this heading, it is now necessary to examine to what extent the
deployment of OTTs in India can be read according to the concept of
world economy of culture and communication. The cultural and commu-
nication industries, especially the film and television industries, are articu-
lated in various ways on a transnational scale. The idea of economy-world
 7 INDUSTRIAL AND FINANCIAL STRUCTURES OF OVER-THE-TOPS (OTTS)… 139

suggests these articulations are crossed by relations of force and domina-

tion. Braudel’s world economy forms an “economic whole” with three
characteristics: it occupies a given geographical space; it has a centre; and
every world economy is divided into successive zones “less and less
favoured as one moves away from one’s triumphant centre”. (Braudel
1985, p. 94) Inspired by Braudel, Wallerstein (2002) and Mattelart
(1992), we can consider the world economy of culture and communica-
tion being structured and hierarchized in different concentric circles. The
peripheral areas are “exploited” for the benefit of the centre, in particular
for the benefit of dominant Anglo-Saxon actors.
These articulations and these relations of domination are both indus-
trial and financial. On the industrial perspective, according to PEC, trad-
ing conditions are very unequal. Works produced in the centre are bought
in the peripheries while the exchanges in the other direction are very small.
On the financial level, the world economy of communication also refers to
the domination of major US financial players on others. This domination
is itself linked to the rise in the shareholding of industrial players of large
investment funds (as, for instance, the Vanguard Group or BlackRock),
present in the capital of many industrial groups around the world. In addi-
tion, the complex and multiple influences of the two major global credit
rating agencies, Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s, both US, and some very
large investment banks, including Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and
Goldman & Sachs, significantly strengthens this dominance. The orienta-
tion they give greatly affect the ability of industrial players to raise funds.
Not only do they have difficulty raising funds, but the badly evaluated
players also have to devote a significant portion of their income to divi-
dend distributions and buybacks of their own shares in order to support
their share price. As a result, from the point of view of digital deployment,
financialization has greatly favoured the actors of the communication
industries compared to those of the cultural industries. Do these theoreti-
cal constructions shed light on the situation prevailing in India, at the
financial as well at the industrial levels?
Firstly, on the financial level, in many ways, the situation of OTTs in
India can be interpreted in terms of the world economy, that is, closely
related to the capital of the centre of the world economy, American capital
and the major US players in the financial sphere. We will therefore exam-
ine here to which extent OTT players active in India are financialized and
whether the shareholding of these actors is mainly foreign, especially
American, or Indian. Before entering into the specifics of OTTs’ financial
140 P. BOUQUILLION

dimension in India, it should be remembered that India’s openness to

transnational financial exchanges is relatively recent. Various economic
and financial liberalization measures have been taken since 1991, facilitat-
ing both privatization and increasing openness to foreign capital in various
economic sectors, including the cultural and communication industries.
In 2016, a new impetus was given to this liberalization movement. On
June 20, 2016, the government announced a reform of the rules applica-
ble to foreign investments. In various sectors, foreign ownership thresh-
olds have been high, or 100% ownership has been allowed, while
authorization procedures have been simplified and relaxed. The acquisi-
tion of distributors of television channels, whether broadcast by cable,
satellite or mobile phone, may however be done without this approval
(Bouissou 2016). The legal opening does not mean, however, that foreign
financiers are rushing to invest. In most cases, the investment limits have
been achieved, and the sectors implicated by OTTs are not necessarily at
the forefront of foreign direct investment (FDI).
Indeed, the cultural industries (information-broadcasting, including
print media) are only the 15th sector concerned with foreign investments
with, in 2018, $8.38 billion, or 2% of total FDI this year. Thus, the trans-
formation of foreign direct investment rules has not drastically changed
the capital position of Indian OTT players. The presence of the financial
interests of the centre of the world economy in the ownership of the OTT
actors in India is contrasted according to the actors and the sectors.
Table 7.1 summarizes the financial performance in terms of market capi-
talization and turnover of the main players in the market for OTT audio-­
visual platforms offering “professional” content (and not UGC). The first
column gives the name of the platform and that of the parent companies.
The second column contains the market capitalization of the parent com-
pany or subsidiary offering the platform when the company is listed on the
stock exchange. The third column contains the turnover. The platforms
are ranked in descending order of market capitalization.
Several lessons can be drawn from this table. First lesson, it shows that
the presence of foreign interests in the OTT market is massive. Of the 13
OTT actors included in this table, eight are foreign players, four are Indian
and one actor is almost equally controlled by Indian and American inter-
ests. Some of those foreign industrial players have established subsidiaries
sometimes for a long time in India, as Walt Disney (through Fox’s audio-­
visual assets in India) or Viacom. The presence of American players is
important, four platforms are under American control and one is half
 7 INDUSTRIAL AND FINANCIAL STRUCTURES OF OVER-THE-TOPS (OTTS)… 141

Table 7.1 The financial dimension of OTT platforms. (Data source: Economic
Times 2019)
Name of the Market Revenue Shareholding details
subsidiary OTT capitalization
and of the parent
companies

Amazon Prime (Amazon) (Amazon) The company is controlled by

Video/Amazon $886.7 billion $252.8 billion US shareholders.
(August 17, (FY 2018)
2019)
Hotstar (Walt Disney) (Walt Disney) The company is controlled by
(StarIndia)/Walt $240 billion $67.7 billion US shareholders.
Disney (August 15, (FY 2018)
2019)
Netflix (Netflix) (Netflix) The company is controlled by
$132.57 billion $17.6 billion US shareholders.
(August 17, (FY 2018)
2019)
Reliance Jio/ (Reliance (Reliance The company is controlled by
Reliance Industries Industries) Industries) Indian shareholders.
$113.6 billion $85.43 billion
(August 17, (FY 2019)
2019)
Sony Liv/Sony $69.5 billion $81.4 billion The company is controlled by
Corporation (August 17, (FY 2019) Japanese shareholders.
2019)
HOOQ / (Singtel) (Singtel) HOOQ is a joint venture
Singtel&Warner $37.4 billion $12.2 billion between Singtel (85%), Warner
Bros&Sony (August 17, (FY 2019) Bros (7.5%) and Sony Pictures
Pictures 2019) (7.5%).
Airtel Wynck/ (Bharti Airtel) (Bharti Airtel) The company is controlled by
Bharti Airtel $25.9 billion $11.4 billion Indian shareholders.
(August 17, (FY 2019)
2019)
Voot/Viacom18/ (Viacom) (Viacom) Voot is owned by Viacom18,
Reliance $10.3 billion $12.8 billion which belongs to Reliance
Industries/Viacom (August 17, (FY 2018) Industries (51%), and to Viacom
2019) (49%), the American
entertainment player.
(continued)
142 P. BOUQUILLION

Table 7.1 (continued)

Name of the Market Revenue Shareholding details

subsidiary OTT capitalization
and of the parent
companies

Zee5/Zee (Zee (Zee This company was until

Entertainment Entertainment) Entertainment) mid-2019 majority-controlled by
$4.6 billion $11.4 billion Indian interests and in particular
(August 17, (FY 2019) by the Essel Group and its
2019) founder. The foreign interests
became dominant with 47% of
the share owned by foreign
institutions and 12.36% by
foreign promoters.
Viu/PCCW (PCCW) (PCCW) PCCW is a player from Hong
$4.2 billion $4.5 billion Kong active in ICT
(August 17, (FY 2019)
2019)
Vodafone Idea (Vodafone (Vodafone Company created by the merger
Idea) Idea) between Vodafone and Idea
$2.5 billion $5.9 billion Cellular in August 2018. Foreign
(August 17, (FY 2019) promoters own 53.57% of the
2019) company and foreign institutions,
15.67%.
Eros Now/Eros $120.4 million $270.1 million The company is controlled by
International (August 17, (FY 2019) Indian shareholders.
2019)
ALTBalaji/Balaji $69.4 million $55.4 million The company is controlled by
Telefilms (August 17, (FY 2019) Indian shareholders.
2019)

American. However, this presence is not exclusive. Asian interest is also

present, with players from Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan and of course
India. Finally, a British actor is also to count. Thus, the classic scheme of
the world economy with a single financial centre, and of course an
American one, corresponds only partially to the reality of the Indian OTT
market. In this respect, this situation is not specific to the OTT or to India
but corresponds to a central geopolitical trend in recent years, with the
rise in power at the industrial and financial levels of the Asian players.
Second lesson, these foreign players are among the most financially
powerful. Apart from Amazon, one of the largest market capitalizations in
 7 INDUSTRIAL AND FINANCIAL STRUCTURES OF OVER-THE-TOPS (OTTS)… 143

the world, there is also Walt Disney, the world’s leading market capitaliza-
tion among cultural industry players, as well as Netflix. The latter benefits
from a particular financial situation with a capitalization disproportionate
to its profits. However, this does not mean that these powerful players are
able to crush their competitors especially the Indian competitors. Because
they are global players, they have to think about their investments on a
transnational scale and not just on the Indian scale.
Third lesson, in comparison with the main global actors, the players
active in the OTT whose shareholding is mainly Indian have a much lower
financial performance. Similarly, again the centrality of telecommunica-
tions operators must be emphasized. Their “financial size” is larger than
that of Indian-owned audio-visual actors, but it is smaller than that of the
major transnational players with OTT affiliates in India. Reliance
Industries, active through Reliance Jio but also through majority or
minority holdings in other companies (Balaji Telefilms, Viacom18, Eros
International) and Bharti Airtel are the most powerful Indian operators of
the OTT. On the other hand, the financial size of the historical audio-­
visual players held by Indian interests and present in the OTT is rather
weak, even very weak in comparison with those of their competitors. The
market capitalizations of Eros International and even more of Balaji
Telefilms are very small. The rise of Reliance Industries within their capital
can therefore be interpreted as an attempt to seal the industrial alliances by
financial partnerships but also as an Indianization of OTT capitalism vis-à-­
vis foreign interests. The only player with an international financial foot-
print, Zee Entertainment, came under foreign majority control in 2019.
Fourth lesson, it would be interesting to further investigate the trans-
national stakes of certain alliances. Is there a link between Reliance
Industries’ presence in Balaji Telefilms’ shareholding and the strategy of
this firm in order to propose OTT services abroad, in particular to the
Indian diaspora? Moreover, does the presence of strong American indus-
trial interests active in the field of content industries (Disney, Viacom,
Warner) to the capital of OTT actors in India lead these actors to bet
especially on American content and especially on blockbusters to assert
their offer in the Indian market?
These questions can be addressed in the following subsection, which is
dedicated to the industrial aspects of the integration of the Indian OTT
into the world economy of culture and communication. We have just
observed that at the financial level, the schemes proposed by PEC and in
particular that of the world economy apply partially. American interests are
144 P. BOUQUILLION

very present but many other foreign interests are present while the Indian
interests thanks to the telecommunications operators are also powerful
and are not under the dependence of the American actors, those of the
centre of the economy-world. What about on the industrial level? Secondly,
on the industrial level, the question that now arises is whether foreign
content, in particular American content, dominates the Indian market of
OTT audio-visual platforms. Do the Indian OTT platforms function as
relays for distributing content produced in the centre of the world econ-
omy? Or is another perspective emerging thanks to the deployment of
SVOD OTT audio-visual platforms?
Before attempting to provide answers to this question, it should be
remembered that prior to the deployment of SVOD platforms, and still
today, on conventional modes of content distribution, whether film or
television content, foreign content is poorly represented while Indian con-
tent, made in India, and in Hindi or in regional languages, are very domi-
nant. Linguistic fragmentation into different regional languages is a very
important factor in the economics of cultural industries in India. The
question is not only the attachment of Indians to “Indian” content but
their attachment to content produced in their particular mother tongue
(see Athique et al. 2018). Thus, for instance, in 1991, when News
Corporation expanded its Asian business to India with the creation of Star
India, now one of India’s largest television player, Rupert Murdoch’s
group relied on the importation of American content to seduce Indian
viewers. It was a failure and the group was forced to produce and broad-
cast Indian content and to “Indianize” the entire team including the most
senior officials. Other foreign players that have established in India, includ-
ing Viacom or Sony, have also produced and broadcast Indian content in
various Indian languages. Do platforms change the game? In other words,
is the presence in India of platforms global actors as well as the creation of
platforms by the actors formerly installed in India but held by foreign
interests like Star India, will lead to a reversal of the trend, to favour
American and global content at the expense of Indian content? It would
be necessary to conduct a study of both the content available on the plat-
forms and their users to be able to answer precisely these questions. In
addition, the situation could change over time. The development of these
platforms only dates back from the second half of 2010s.
Similarly, it is difficult to assess to what extent the Indian situation pres-
ents specificities. In other countries, situations are contrasted both from
the point of view of the balance of power between domestic and foreign
 7 INDUSTRIAL AND FINANCIAL STRUCTURES OF OVER-THE-TOPS (OTTS)… 145

actors and the penetration of global content. In addition, empirical work

is lacking. However, some elements can be underlined. In China, American
actors in the cultural and communication industries and their contents
have great difficulties to penetrate with bans of certain offers or drastic
quotas. The aim is to protect the Chinese market, which in very strong
growth, from foreign competitors, and to reserve it for Chinese players.
Thanks to this protectionist policy some of them (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent,
etc.) have already reached a significant size compared to the global
American players. The Chinese situation is therefore very different from
that of India. In Latin America, an area with important domestic actors in
the audio-visual industries, the OTT market (counting only that of TV
series and films) in 2018 would amount to $3.3 billion. Netflix is in a very
dominant position with 65% of market share (Broadband TV News 2019).
Brazil and to a lesser extent Mexico are the two most important markets
in Latin America. There is still no published data on the place of global
content in Latin American audio-visual platforms. On the other hand, in
most of these countries, despite the existence of domestic cultural indus-
tries, the presence of foreign cultural productions is often very strong. For
instance, in Brazil, domestic films only accounted for 16.5% of the theatri-
cal market in 2016, according to the Agencia Nacional do Cinema
(Ancine 2019).
These examples show that apart from strict protectionist measures, nei-
ther the existence of powerful domestic cultural industries nor policies of
subsidies to national content are sufficient to avoid the domination of
American actors and content in these geographical areas of the so-called
emerging countries. In the Indian case, it is difficult to appreciate the
influence and their evolution over time of the various factors contributing
to favour or disadvantage global content consumption: the offer of global
content and its structuring character, access fees for consumers to these
contents, socio-cultural factors and the role of global content in the phe-
nomena of distinction for the members of certain social groups and so on.
However, already, two important trends are present in the strategies of the
actors of the platforms. They derogate from the scenario of domination of
American content.
First, all foreign players are developing intense Indianization policies
for their content offer. Our interviews and expertise confirm this trend
which is particularly related to the linguistic and cultural fragmentation of
India: “Apart from Bollywood films, streaming platforms are also focusing
on regional content” (Ernst & Young 2019, p. 87). Strategies
146 P. BOUQUILLION

differentiated according to the subspaces must be conducted: “Many

investors realized the heterogeneity of India and have created multiple
strategies to target India and Bharat and the different strata within them.
There is not going to be a single market strategy, and companies adapted
to the fact that global strategies do not always work in India” (Ernst &
Young 2019, p. 87). Even the largest global players are pursuing such a
strategy: “Amazon and Netflix have both commissioned in excess of ten
originals as well from India and are expected to spend over INR 10 bil-
lion” (Ernst & Young 2019, p. 123). However, it is true that most of their
content is American.
The second trend is the development of Indian content exports through
platforms. Most active platform players in India are looking to expand
their services overseas and offer their Indian content. OTT distribution
could thus be substituted for other vectors, in particular cable and satellite.
For instance, “ZEE is planning to pull the plug on its linear television
service in Europe, Australia, Fiji and a few other overseas markets and
offer content only via the video OTT service, Zee5” (Ernst & Young
2019, p. 36). Similarly, “Star India had discontinued distribution of televi-
sion channels in Canada and the US and has been offering content only
through its video on-demand player, Hotstar” (Ernst & Young 2019,
p. 36). Global players, and especially Netflix, have a very special strategy in
order to produce transnational content. Indeed, Netflix content is never
thought of for distribution in a single national context but, when it comes
to non-US content, the aim is of course to be attractive in the country of
production, but also to be popular seen elsewhere. As our surveys indicate,
Netflix’s algorithms classify the various types of scenarios and storytelling
as well as actors and directors according to their potential for trans-­
nationalization. It should not be surprising, then, that content made for
one country may be successful elsewhere, as shown by the example of
Sacred Games: “Two of every three viewers of Netflix’s Sacred Games were
from outside India” (Ernst & Young 2019, p. 124). This example shows
that the actors of the centre of the world economy are trying not only to
disseminate the contents of the centre in the peripheries, but also to
exploit the resources available in the peripheries to produce content.
Indeed, the peripheries offer high-quality but low-paid “talent”. Thus,
India has become for the transnational audio-visual players, a space of
creatives.
To sum up, the second section of this paper questioned the various
forms of transnationalization of audio-visual actors and content related to
 7 INDUSTRIAL AND FINANCIAL STRUCTURES OF OVER-THE-TOPS (OTTS)… 147

the development of OTT. The central question concerned the interpreta-

tion of these forms of transnationalization. Can they be considered as the
exploitation of the periphery of the world economy by its US centre? We
have seen that American interests are very present in the shareholding of
OTT players in India. These actors have been active in India generally for
a long time, long before the emergence of the OTT, but they find there a
new vector of development in India. Nevertheless, actors from other geo-
graphical areas are also present illustrating the fact that the world economy
is moving from a single, American centre to a plurality of centres, espe-
cially Asian. Indian actors, especially those in telecommunications, are also
powerful players able to offer an alternative to the exploitation of the
periphery by the centre. Similarly, in terms of content, the EPC schemas,
describing a dominance of US content on domestic content, hardly apply,
either before the OTT or with the OTT. It is still difficult to assess whether
this is an Indian exception to the situations prevailing internationally.
Anyway, the extent of Indian content production strategies by Indian and
foreign OTT actors indicates how India has become a space of creative re
s for the audio-visual industries. Moreover, public policies help: “to give
impetus to co-productions and collaboration between Indian and overseas
filmmakers, the Indian Government has entered into co-production trea-
ties with various countries such as China, Canada, France, Germany,
Brazil, Italy, New Zealand and the UK” (Ernst & Young 2018, p. 23).

Conclusion
In considering some of the trends at work in OTT audio-visual platforms,
it is apparent that the dynamics of capitalism are strong within these activi-
ties. In many respects, one can observe the continuation of earlier move-
ments: new areas of capital development are created; the nature of
competition in television is oligopolistic, content production and volume
of telecommunications is increasing; transnational players, especially
American ones, occupy dominant positions. Similarly, larger players in the
communication industries have entered the OTT platforms either in the
logic of joint products or to accompany the transformation of their former
core businesses. Thus, in many ways OTT platforms operate in a capitalist
logic as defined by researchers in the political economy of communication.
These platforms have increased the capitalist dimension in the diverse sec-
tors involved in OTT. However, the deployment of OTTs is also marked
by specificities compared to other movements of articulation between
148 P. BOUQUILLION

cultural industries and communication industries in the digital environ-

ment. Platform operators are generally obliged to produce original con-
tent and/or to have exclusive rights over content. Moreover, one of the
specificities of the Indian case is that the most attractive content is always
Indian content, especially in Hindi or regional languages. As a conse-
quence of these factors, media industry players have managed to maintain
their position vis-à-vis the players in the communication industries, includ-
ing the largest ones, such as Amazon.

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 PART III

Platform Workers
 CHAPTER 8

Journalistic Practices and Algorithmic

Governance

M. Shuaib Mohamed Haneef and Aquil Ahmad Khan

Digital newsrooms are experiencing continual shifts in their everyday

practices through successive phases of technological remediation. With
the arrival of a platform ecology, newsrooms are getting reconfigured at
professional, discursive and spatial levels. The ecology of the digital news-
room thus requires us to examine the production and consumption of
news from an institutional perspective in the context of the increased use
of mobile devices and algorithmic processes to produce, package and dis-
tribute news content (Asp 2014; Napoli 2014). This technological recon-
figuration has ushered in a paradigmatic shift in journalistic practices in
India (Anderson 2012; Örnebring 2010). It can be argued that journalis-
tic labour has received a fillip due to the material and discursive interven-
tion of algorithms that provide a point of departure in the everyday
practices of journalism. The norms of algorithms and the reflexivity of
humans mutually constitute a set of disjunctive and coalescing forces that
modulate the labour process and professional ethos in the business of

M. S. M. Haneef (*) • A. A. Khan

Pondicherry University, Puducherry, India
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 153

A. Athique, V. Parthasarathi (eds.), Platform Capitalism in India,
Global Transformations in Media and Communication Research - A
Palgrave and IAMCR Series,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44563-8_8
154 M. S. M. HANEEF AND A. A. KHAN

journalism. The reshaping of journalists, labour and news production by

algorithms is likely to constitute news as an algorithmic commodity. Fuchs
(2012) and Fisher (2015) have nonetheless raised concerns that algo-
rithms will effectively hide the labour process of journalists. Thus, while it
is sanguine to argue that news is now co-produced by journalists and algo-
rithms, this new assemblage is constitutive of power relations wherein
algorithms are poised to incrementally discipline and reconfigure journal-
istic functions.
Our study used qualitative research design to understand emergent
journalistic practices in two digital news websites, namely Ippodhu and
DoolNews, as well as the Tamil-language edition of the digital portal,
Oneindia. Oneindia portal, initially known as www.indiainfo.com, pro-
duces news in four South Indian languages (Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam,
Telugu) besides Hindi, which is widely spoken in North India. The pres-
ent workforce comprises 25 journalists, including their technical team, in
addition to freelance content writers. The Oneindia desk headquartered in
Bangalore uploads stories and produces graphics and data-based reports.
DoolNews is a Malayalam-language digital news outlet set up in 2009 and
headquartered in Kozhikode, Kerala. DoolNews has a team of 23 journal-
ists who produce content, using cameras and other basic audiovisual tech-
nologies. Ippodhu is a small independent media outlet launched in 2015
catering to a Tamil-language audience Its team comprises of an editor,
subeditor, principal correspondent and two journalists in addition to the
marketing team. Ippodhu provides content on various platforms including
mobile apps, a Facebook page, YouTube channel, Twitter feed as well as
on its own website. In our research, face-to-face in-depth interviews and
telephone interviews were conducted with editors and journalists of all
three organisations in order to elicit information on journalists’ percep-
tions of their work practices in the digital ecosystem. Interviews were tran-
scribed and coded deductively to organise the data into themes and
categories drawing on the concepts of free labour, affective labour and
audience as economic capital.

Automation and Algorithmic Thinking in Journalism

Digital technologies have reinvigorated the news industry in India, and
revitalised and expanded the profession of journalism. All facets of journal-
ism have undergone marked changes, raising the question of what consti-
tutes journalism today and who should be counted as a journalist (Carlson
 8 JOURNALISTIC PRACTICES AND ALGORITHMIC GOVERNANCE 155

2015). Legacy media organisations began integrating digital technologies

into their workflow practices, thus paving the way for the emergence of
digital forms of journalism that are distinct from the traditional canons
and practices of news production and distribution. The rise of user-­
generated content throughout the platform ecosystem in India has also
engendered a proliferation of citizen journalism for a digital public. At the
same time, non-profit news start-ups “are proliferating, collaborating, and
becoming a significant part of the emerging media ecology” (Konieczna
and Robinson 2014, p. 969). The news start-ups are invariably “digital
native media” companies that were born and grown entirely online or on
digital platform (Wu 2016).
Contemporary journalism, in legacy and start-ups, is thus imbued with
computational journalism, a practice that uses algorithms and codes to
find and tell stories (Diakopoulos 2014; Coddington 2015). The mathe-
matical precision of computational thinking that algorithms and software
advance and the prescience of human thinking are the two logics that
define news production, distribution and consumption in the refashioned
news media ecology (Wing 2008). At the same time, the ubiquitous pres-
ence of digital technologies has entangled news producers in a crossover
between human labour and technological process. With new techniques,
non-profit and digital news websites aim for a revised journalist-audience
relationship, wherein citizens are considered to be digital prosumers
involved in the co-production of news (Toffler 1981). In addition to user-­
generated content, many news organisations have pursued the automation
of the news making process in order to bolster the productivity, and bot-
tom line, of their newsrooms.

Digital Journalism and Labour

Digital journalism start-ups in India are proliferating, though many of
them have not yet found a sustainable business model (Aneez et al. 2016).
Although critical theorists have started addressing labour studies in the
digital age, labour discourse has been sidelined historically in Media
Studies (Frayssé and O’Neil 2015). Mosco also described labour as a
blindspot of western communication studies (2006). Likewise,
Parthasarathi has argued that work and labour are perhaps the most
neglected scholarship in the field of media economy (2018). Amidst the
growing discussion of industrial transformation, there is still scant consid-
eration given to the rank and file in news organisations and their changing
156 M. S. M. HANEEF AND A. A. KHAN

contributions to the news industry (Hardt and Brennen 1995). At the

international level, however, major contributions to labour studies are
now emerging from several media scholars, directed towards organisa-
tional policy, creative class, immaterial labour, knowledge labour, condi-
tions of labour in the changing digital industry scenarios and in the context
of digital capitalism Deuze 2007; Florida 2002; Fuchs 2014; Hardt and
Negri 2000; Lazzarato 1996; Mosco and McKercher 2009; Scholz 2012).
The digitisation of the news industry has witnessed “deep changes in
labour markets” resulting in cost-cutting (Frayssé and O’Neil 2015).
Journalists have been recast as remunerated digital labourers working
alongside prosumers involved in free labour (Toffler 1981). On the flip
side, the integration of technologies into the newsroom and automation
of news production have raised concerns whether technologies would bol-
ster or displace human beings, news credibility and their productivity
(David 2015; Soule 1977; Susskind and Susskind 2015). The perceived
inherent power associated with journalists in democratic societies is
increasingly being challenged by the arrival of social media, algorithms,
artificial intelligence (AI) and other disruptive communication technolo-
gies (Anderson 2011). Platforms and tools such as Facebook, Twitter,
WhatsApp and so on overshadow the distribution process of traditional
news industry publishers (Bell et al. 2017) All these rapid changes, occur-
ring as part of convergence, posit that the news industry is at the cusp of
transitions and asking for human resources with different skill sets primar-
ily founded in digital ways of handling journalism. Thus, Lanier has argued
that technologies do not displace human labour but only reorder it (2014).
The use of social media and the rise of algorithm-based journalism has
changed the professional routines of journalists by causing them to engage
in multi-skilling. Multi-skilling has caused an increase in workload and a
never-ending deadline pressure for reporters. At the same time, the explo-
sive commercialisation of the Internet, especially social media, heralds free
labour with the increasing concentration of user-generated content
(Terranova 2000). The user-generated content constitutes involuntary
coordination or autonomic labour that does not go through a market or
monetary system but eventually valourises the social value into financial
earnings. As a result, social media spaces and websites become social
automaton factory and value is produced in the networked economy
(ibid.). The value produced may not be a boomer but it constitutes tiny
parts in the long tail of the economies of digital native websites. The rise
in the use of messaging apps by individuals and groups has jolted the
 8 JOURNALISTIC PRACTICES AND ALGORITHMIC GOVERNANCE 157

mainstream media and journalists working within. The will of the political
class to delegitimise the mainstream media (Ninan 2019) and generate its
own stream of content through social media has redirected the work prac-
tices of journalists towards acceding to popular demands.
Against this backdrop, the tasks of a journalist would now include infer-
ring comments posted by citizens, combing through databases to produce
stories, ensuring a considerable following in social media, tweeting and so
on. It is now more a question of how journalists leverage technologies to
execute a multitude of tasks. Further, the coming of technologies has
made journalists reconsider their core skills that define their journalistic
labour, which is an amalgamation of human labour, watering-down of
values and machine-driven algorithmic journalistic labour. In a networked
collaboration, journalists aim to form huge collectives and communities of
audiences. Users invest hours of their time rendering free service consum-
ing content, which in itself is a viable productive facet of immaterial labour
(Lazzarato 1996). On both ends, time thus becomes a crucial material
metric that defines the complex form of labour involved in journalistic
production. Fuchs has argued that “the secret of Facebook’s profits is that
it mobilizes billion hours of users’ work time (at the level of values) that is
unpaid (at the level of prices)” (2012, pp. 714–716). As for time, journal-
ists invest in reflexive time, synchronic time and diachronic time (Siapera
and Iliadi 2015). Reflexive time refers to time journalists invest in to mon-
itor their social media accounts; responding to users and their comments
is referred to as synchronic time and diachronic time refers to community
building activities by journalists. The efforts of journalists in maintaining
networks thus constitute surplus value, which is accumulated in the form
of social capital in turn valourised by social media platforms.
Another contemporary approach towards studying labour emerges
from Actor-Network Theory (Lewis and Westlund 2015), which collects
human and non-human actants such as technologies, automated tools and
human inputs in an assemblage. Journalists as well as citizens involve
themselves in immaterial labour to produce information (Lazzarato 1996).
Immaterial labour, for Lazzarato, has two components namely “informa-
tional”, which deals with skills and know-how journalists need to have to
perform their tasks, and “cultural”, which leads to the production of cul-
tural standards. Hardt and Negri (2000) defined affective labour as one
which involves production of collective subjectivities through networking
and human contact. Extending the notion of affective labour to journal-
ism, one could argue how the labour of production is actualised through
158 M. S. M. HANEEF AND A. A. KHAN

social media and other digital spaces. Thus a news product is not to be
evaluated based on how much time a journalist spends or invests in pro-
ducing it but it is to be determined by the affective publics and rhizomatic
connections the journalist produces through his/her news reports
(Papacharissi 2015).

Algorithms and Bots and Multi-skilled

Digital Journalism
With the advancement of technology, Aljazairi has claimed that human
journalists will be replaced by nonhuman journalists very soon as editors
have been replaced by software editing programmes (2016). As today’s
journalism is more about generating volumes of articles, the role of
ro(bots) in journalism is going to be key to news industry. Though jour-
nalistic community is very fearful about the introduction of robot, James
Kotecki, the Head of Communications at Automated Insights (AI)—an
American-based technology company, claimed that he is not aware of any
single job that technology has replaced. Nonetheless, in an algorithmic
environment, programmers and data analysts are also producing news sto-
ries apart from trained journalists. Bots are used to produce bespoken
stories based on users’ inputs and feedback. In this case, some of the pub-
lic interest stories are not decided by expert journalists rather than by real-­
time web analytics. Traditionally, journalists of print media attempted to
ignore audience feedback fearing it would affect their news judgement
(Aljazairi 2016; Beam 1995). However, the rise of digital platforms and
real-time analytics has instituted audience feedback in the reckoning of
news production. The use of algorithms not only enables journalists to
track users to know what content they access but also informs journalists
on what news is to be given. Algorithms are being used to extract social
value from the economic asset of Big Data (Just and Latzer 2017). The
widespread use of algorithms in almost every Internet application illus-
trates their acknowledgement and relevance for the digital era (Anderson
2013; Gillespie 2014; Mager 2012; Pasquale 2015). Algorithms as soft-
ware, and as a structure, institution or an actor, increasingly govern the
news industry. Algorithms govern the everyday practices of news produc-
tion through their material affordances and their interlacing of software,
journalists and users.
 8 JOURNALISTIC PRACTICES AND ALGORITHMIC GOVERNANCE 159

The onset of multi-platform publishing also requires that journalists are

proficient in technical as well as journalistic information gathering and
writing skills. Engaging in a multitude of tasks, journalists at the three
outlets, produce multimodal stories using mobile phones and other tech-
nologies. Typing was earlier considered to be a technical skill that journal-
ists did not have to deal with. However, Suhail, the editor of DoolNews,
said that in changed conditions under informational capitalism, journalists
are required to multi-task:

It was not the task of journalists to type, check or proof read the content but
gradually changed. But today if journalists know graphic, camera and
designing it is an additional credit.… But we expect journalists to be doing
multi-tasking. (Interview)

The small team of journalists at DoolNews collects stories from differ-

ent beats and at the same time churn out more stories to attract larger
audience. Suhail expressed that the emphasis on quantity has resulted in
downsizing employees and simultaneously in scaling up the responsibili-
ties of a journalist:

Instead of appointing four or five journalists in different sections, they are

now appointing two or three people who can work in all the sections.
Thereby the number of employees is reduced, without compromising on
the product. (Interview)

Every journalist at DoolNews takes upon himself/herself the responsi-

bility of producing stories as well as editing them for fear of getting most
of the content brusquely snipped by editors. The senior correspondent,
Shafeeq, said that the editor would have no understanding of the back-
ground of the story:

When the footage of our shot is given to an editor, without our supervision
most of its contents are likely to get destroyed. Because the editor doesn’t
know about the background of the news footage they are editing…the out-
come will not be what the reporter might have foreseen. So, in this context,
the role of multitasking will be of great use. (Interview)

The journalist also outlined the downside of multitasking as attention

is divided between technical skills and information gathering. However,
160 M. S. M. HANEEF AND A. A. KHAN

he added that mojo (mobile journalism), has eliminated the need for pay-
ing attention to technical details:

When I went to the field as both the reporter and cameraman, I have to
adjust the frame, focus, have to check the audio … while controlling all
these, we can’t seriously follow the content in the bytes … I think for mojo,
there isn’t much importance given for perfect framing and other things …
But, I am personally a guy who gives importance to visual aesthetics.
(Interview)

While journalists have a propensity to handling mobile phones and

shooting photos, they are of the view that a dedicated team must be in
place to handle videos so that visual aesthetics and sound are taken care of.
One of the respondents said that except in emergency situations such as
breaking news stories, cameramen should be designated to produce vid-
eos. News production cannot be rigidly compartmentalised in a digital
economy. The flexible labour practices ushered in by technologies and the
extensive labour process of digital news websites and portals are homolo-
gous with post-Fordist regimes of flexible accumulation (Compton and
Benedetti 2010). DoolNews and Ippodhu use WordPress-enabled
Content Management System (CMS). Every journalist in the newsroom
has been assigned user credentials to facilitate uploading of news stories.
Some of the tasks such as adding editors or new tabs in the CMS are
restricted to the admin operating the CMS.
Oneindia, on the other hand, uses Java framework and has a dedicated
team of developers to monitor and upload stories in its web portal.
However, journalists at its desk have been equipped to handle the portal
to ensure that news stories do not wait in the absence of technical persons
or during contingencies. Oneindia, being a larger portal, ensures that its
technical team does not engage in news production activities. Stating that
journalists are from different educational background, a couple of them
being engineers, the editor of Oneindia said its desk team consists of engi-
neers who generate news reports. This reflects how journalists with the tag
of journalism degree do not have dominance with respect to the produc-
tion and distribution of content (Aneez et al. 2016). Swetha, a journalist
working for Oneindia, opined that a journalist those days relied com-
pletely on memory to recollect knowledge about historical events and
contemporary moments. Today, individual memory of recollecting events
finds its alterity in Google search engines and other digital tools:
 8 JOURNALISTIC PRACTICES AND ALGORITHMIC GOVERNANCE 161

Today, one does not have to depend on memory. We appreciate if someone

can recollect 15 years of political history in India or in Tamil Nadu. But, one
can access Google and get all the information. (Interview)

The recognition of technical skills of journalists and their ability to pro-

duce cultural public good has stretched the production cycle in news-
rooms from producing content to distributing it in social media and other
channels. With this, multi-skilling has become ineluctable for a journalist
in digitally run websites. The current times in digital journalism witnesses
the convergence of disparate and diversified newsrooms into an organic
site where all media modalities and their functions coalesce.

Social Media and Collaborative Storytelling

Since the digital transitions, social media have taken centre stage imping-
ing daily routines and journalistic roles in digital news start-ups and native
news outlets. In the converged news media environment, the coming of
social media has changed the relationship between journalists, audience
and news organisations significantly. As a result, daily practices of digital
journalists are getting restructured and reordered with audience partici-
pating in news production through citizen journalism (Jönsson and
Örnebring 2011). Further, social media platforms such as Facebook,
YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and the messaging app WhatsApp afford
horizontal distribution of news stories in contrast to the vertical flow of
content to readers favoured by traditional journalism.
All journalists at Oneindia desk are required to have an account in social
media such as Facebook and Twitter. The editor of the Tamil edition of
the portal said that a journalist who does not use social media is detached
from the information world. He stated that virality determines the popu-
larity of news indicating that journalists need to find news stories in and
tell stories through social media. Thus, the task of the desk journalists at
Oneindia encompasses investing time in keeping a close vigil on trending
stories and identifying news reports with human interest value from social
media that are later developed into elaborate stories for publication in its
news portal. As part of the routine, the team at desk monitors emerging
posts and tweets by following the pages of potential newsmakers including
politicians and celebrities. Stating that news is not viral, rather virality is
news, Arivalagan, the editor of the Tamil edition of Oneindia portal, added:
162 M. S. M. HANEEF AND A. A. KHAN

Some of the best news reports, short and long, are published by users in
social media … Our desk sources stories that have human interest values
from social media pages. They also visit PM’s page as information is first
released in one’s individual pages and accounts … Journalists need to know
the importance of speed and judgement while selecting stories from social
media and publishing them online. (Interview)

On the other hand, journalists at DoolNews use less of Twitter for news
distribution. According to the editor of DoolNews, Suhail, Twitter is an
elite medium and it is mostly used to get updates about celebrities that
audience is curious to know.
The social media strategies of Ippodhu for news production and distri-
bution stand out in stark contrast. The digital media outlet has a daily
offering of 30-minute live discussion through Facebook live on socially
and politically relevant topics. Experts from different fields are invited to
talk on contemporary issues and they offer their expertise free acting in the
best interest of the community. These programmes are later shared on its
official website. At DoolNews, social media are considered to be impor-
tant sources of regional and local news. The editor of DoolNews said that
digitally native websites have stopped depending on national and main-
stream news websites for content as the focus has shifted from interna-
tional and national stories to regional and local stories. More stories are
generated from social media compared to field reporting. The editor
expressed:

Presently, social media is the biggest provider of news. Two or three years
ago, most of the online media followed a pattern. They copy news stories
from national websites and other leading newspapers. Now …we generally
don’t go through other national websites because mainly, we are showing
local regional news. For us, social media is the main news source. (Interview)

Shafeeq, a senior correspondent at DoolNews, mentioned that the

organisation is still translating stories from national websites. He said that
DoolNews has a specific social media team where currently one person is
involved in monitoring social media pages. That does not remove journal-
ists from following their social media accounts or relieve them from moni-
toring analytics. On the other hand, journalists have to verify the
authenticity of news stories that they intend to publish, localise and rework
on. While social media consists of stories, mostly written by independent
 8 JOURNALISTIC PRACTICES AND ALGORITHMIC GOVERNANCE 163

authors and self-made citizen journalists, they are also the breeding ground
for fake news. This puts a heavy burden on journalists to sift fake news
from real content. Consequently, the social media engagement of journal-
ists includes publishing and promoting their own stories, sourcing story
ideas and also exercising caution and using tools to check if a certain news
is authentic or not:

We get around 100 news stories. Sometimes, we go on reports seen on

social media after checking their authenticity. We check the credibility by
identifying reliable resources, if possible, we try to collect photographs.
(Interview)

Overdependence on social media would have journalists erring yet they

cannot divorce themselves from using them. On the other hand, social
media have intensified the labour practices of journalists. Interestingly, this
has given rise to new digital start-ups only to detect fake news. The editor
of Oneindia admits that social media produce a deluge of ingenious and
equally fake and misleading content. The senior correspondent of
DoolNews said: “We didn’t have any technique to check the authenticity
of the news. In such cases, we must be vigilant if the news is from social
media” (interview). The use of social media is woven around immediacy,
which has become the overwhelming priority among online digital jour-
nalism. Immediacy in the backdrop of digital ecology redefines the labour
practices of journalists who co-opt varied skills such as reporting, editing,
scanning through social media pages of celebrities and politicians, moni-
toring for user feedback and so on. Such an unfailing immediacy would
refrain journalists from reflecting on issues and events as they would not
have time to work on specific stories eventually producing “churnalism”
(Davies 2008). As the senior correspondent of DoolNews put it, journal-
ists at DoolNews use WhatsApp more than Facebook. Shafeeq also said
that when DoolNews realised that Facebook alters algorithms for its mon-
etary ends, the digital news outlet preferred WhatsApp to Facebook:

Facebook changes their algorithm and they are interested in commercial

purpose. They reduce the reach on normal post and increase the reach of
sponsored ads. They change the algorithm to earn money from us. So, we
use WhatsApp widely to overcome it. (Interview)
164 M. S. M. HANEEF AND A. A. KHAN

Audience as Capital
Traditional journalism fashioned a direct correlation between content pro-
duction and journalistic values. It naturally followed that content pro-
duced by journalists, adhering to journalistic values, added to the
advertising revenue. In other words, the cultural capital embodied in con-
tent production and management of legacy media houses contributed to
the economic capital operationalised as revenue generated. By contrast,
Ippodhu declares that it practises independent journalism on the grounds
that it provides opportunity to readers in the process of news production
through social media. Readers are encouraged to produce content in the
form of news stories, opinion pieces, photographs or videos. The use of
social media has given rise to appropriating stories and story ideas of users
resulting in increased unpaid free labour. Journalists at DoolNews and
Oneindia have the additional responsibility of monitoring social media
pages for trending stories and stories that audience provide through their
perspectives. None of the three digital news outlets would consider the
cultural capital that they accrue through the mode of production aided by
audience participation as free labour. The editor of Ippodhu, Peer, argued
that the website is provisioning technology and space to users in order to
promote democratic media. He says:

Yeah, particularly our mobile app is designed in such way that audiences can
contribute. It’s a participatory journalism exercise, where audiences can
contribute on an hourly basis. They can keep writing, they take picture and
post on the app, so it’s quite interactive and it is easy to use. (Interview)

The participation of users helps Ippodhu, DoolNews and Oneindia in

generating traffic while at the same time, some of the comments posted by
readers inadvertently become the content or issue to be broached upon
for other readers. In both ways, the digital news outlets benefit out of free
labour that users render. As a journalist with more than 15 years of experi-
ence, the editor of Ippodhu, brings his editorial judgement to bear upon
the relevance of user-generated content before choosing them for new
story ideas. DoolNews and Oneindia allow journalists to pick news stories
from social media according to immediacy and news values. Apart from
human selection, algorithms undergirding social media impel readers to
produce content and participate in society through sharing and respond-
ing to posts. The meeting of algorithms and human journalist underscores
the interplay of machines and humans in journalistic processes.
 8 JOURNALISTIC PRACTICES AND ALGORITHMIC GOVERNANCE 165

The social value and community-building accomplished through user-­

generated content form part of affective labour, where journalists and
users intermingle in larger spatial economies. On the other hand, experts
also contribute their knowledge to Ippodhu and DoolNews through news
programmes. Experts invited by Ippodhu to participate in live video dis-
cussions are not paid. As Ippodhu editor put it, they render their services
realising the motto of independent journalism that the news outlet pro-
motes. This illustrates that all three news outlets rely on a steady stream of
content flowing from users, otherwise termed as unpaid contributions.
What is produced as news as a public good gets converted into a private
property when the traffic data of programmes produced through free and
voluntary labour are valourised and monetised, let alone Ippodhu and
DoolNews are not bent on raking profits. Unlike Ippodhu, freelancing is
not considered free labour at DoolNews. Shafeeq, the senior correspon-
dent at DoolNews, said:

We also accept freelance stories with payment. Dool has freelancers working
on particular subjects like land issues, gender issues and other issues. Some
of them are social activists also as they know more about the subject.
(Interview)

DoolNews also sources news stories from users. The senior correspon-
dent said: “We are giving a chance for people involved in protest to report
their own news. There is a possibility of turning them in(to) reporters and
we are utilising the chance” (interview).

Interplay of Algorithmic and Editorial Judgements

The combination of algorithms of Facebook, Twitter’s impenetrable
application programming interfaces (APIs), and similarly that of Google
layered with the interface of WordPress and other software, including ones
used by journalists to write and file stories, constitutes the assemblage of
algorithms of journalistic practices at Ippodhu, DoolNews and Oneindia.
In the digital era, the sustenance of a news website is determined by traffic
along with content. To succeed consistently in this race, news organisa-
tions have to use different technological innovations and digital arsenals
available such as (messenger) bots, automated applications, analytical tools
and many more. Google Analytics and Facebook are widely being used by
all three news outlets to gauge real time data of visitors and all other
166 M. S. M. HANEEF AND A. A. KHAN

details related to user activities. However, Ippodhu, in principle, does not

want to have any truck with Google AdSense. Journalists at Oneindia have
been trained to take cues from Google Analytics to examine the perfor-
mance of a news report.
However, selection of news stories is not solely determined by algo-
rithms. News stories that are algorithmically signalled to be attracting con-
siderable audience are also tempered with editorial judgements for their
propriety and relevance. When the desk notices that a story purported to
do well, a presupposition derived from editorial judgement, has not gar-
nered adequate hits, editors of Oneindia advise desk journalists to “repair”
the news stories. Stories are thus not killed but are tweaked to deliver bet-
ter results in subsequent hours. The headline or the lead paragraph or
sometimes the entire content is dressed up as newsworthy stories after
they are treated with search engine optimisation techniques. The editorial
judgement prevails but the role of Google Analytics in shoring up the
news report for better desired results cannot be ruled out. He said:
“Judgment is a challenging task. Even if a story does not do good, we will
find out how to repair it or explore it further”. The labour process here
instantiates the intermixing of human and non-human actants, as postu-
lated by the actor-network theory, referred to as ANT, in producing news
and sharing it through a distributed environment (Latour 1987). This
makes the work of journalists at Oneindia particularly time consuming,
having to write headlines for the same story more than once or working
with the same report to suit requirements spelt out by analytics.
At Ippodhu, a couple of journalists go to the field to report on socially
relevant and political stories whereas others aggregate and curate news
content within the office. Ippodhu as an independent digital news plat-
form is an evolving digital news media with a considerable audience fol-
lowing. However, the editor would like to gain popularity and increase
user base in future to be able to reach out to advertisers. He bets it on
analytics that determines the number of page views, bounce-off rate and
time spent viewing an article, among others (Napoli 2014). Peer, the edi-
tor of Ippodhu, said that it helps the website in identifying the audience.
He uses metrics thrown up by analytics to convince advertisers to buy
spaces in the website:

We have not grown to the extent of growing our numbers to the advertis-
ers …. We have grown up to that we are growing slowly may be two years
we will be there … Every editorial meeting we discuss that …you know, why
 8 JOURNALISTIC PRACTICES AND ALGORITHMIC GOVERNANCE 167

we are not being appreciated on this particular news. We do keep record of

what is happening, how many people are getting engaged, why not they are
getting engaged, how much time they are spending … all these data we
derive from Google analytics and we take it very seriously. (Interview)

DoolNews maintains that journalists have the technological know-how

related to web analytics. However, he said that DoolNews does not depend
on metrics-based journalism, nor does it want to task journalists with
tracking analytics. He felt that analytics data can obscure and botch up
quality journalism that it stands for. Thus, editorial judgement of selecting
or reporting news stories remains unaffected while a separate team han-
dling analytics uses the data as a baseline to fine-tune content. The editor
said that DoolNews always draws its audience through its content and not
through its technologies. Apparently, this aligns with the long tail theory
of Anderson (2004) by which DoolNews caters to minority tastes and
offers greater choices to them. Analytics as a non-human actor in the net-
worked labour at DoolNews still intersects with the judgement of human
journalists. However, its role in determining the newsworthiness of stories
published is far from predominant:

In online platforms performance of a news story can be analysed. But some-

times it is confusing and difficult to infer the response of audience. For
example, in rural Journalism we take so much effort go to the location stay
there and collect news and we learn that specific significant news might not
necessarily be even read by them, and they might switch only to the top
stories. So in Dool more than the metrics we focus on target audience let it
be even a small community, we make sure that a certain section do regularly
read our news. We don’t give the burden of the analytics to the journalist
because it affects the quality. (Interview)

Further, the editor of DoolNews said that tracking analytics amounts to

intruding into one’s privacy and underscored that ethical journalism
should desist from monitoring one’s private activities and producing jour-
nalistic content accordingly. However, Suhail does not rule out the possi-
bility of incorporating technologies into newsroom practices in future thus
illustrating that journalistic practices are emergent and marked by fluidity:

Since our policies are contingent on delivering news ethically, we do not

want to peek into the private spheres of a reader’s life as to what s/he likes
and deliver customised content by taking cues from analytics or algo-
168 M. S. M. HANEEF AND A. A. KHAN

rithms … This is our stand till now but tomorrow the technologies may
change … but we will be transparent in our moves. We already built an audi-
ence who are concerned about privacy, which cannot be altered suddenly.
(Interview)

The senior correspondent at DoolNews explained that analytics helps

in knowing the audience and its preferences better. The agenda is set by
the audience and journalists produce what the audience is keen to read.
He also said that algorithmic inferences of what the audience would want
to read, depending on quantitative data such as number of visits and time
spent, are sacrilegious metrics that do not delve into qualitative aspects of
the preferences of the audience. The correspondent expressed that edito-
rial judgement is untenable without integrating analytics data into journal-
ism. Shafeeq referred to a meticulously produced investigative report that
met with less popularity as opposed to curated entertainment stories
attracting huge audience, since

[i]f we understand what draws people’s attention to a topic or its sub-topic,

we’ll be getting advantage out of it…But at the same time, certain things
which analytics give us … are to be taken seriously and critically. As journal-
ists, we’ll be doing our job sincerely by visiting places … and when we finally
make a report on a news story, within 15 minutes a copied material from
other source will be a big hit. (Interview)

The responsibilities of the desk team involve accessing software to get

information about analytics apart from their regular task of editing stories
and giving headlines. Field reporters are fed with this data to produce fol-
low up stories that receive good hits. Sandeep, chief visualiser of Ippodhu
explains:

Those who are working in the desk analyse this data, each and every time
they observe which news is read by more number of people. And we try to
give follow up stories related to that particular news. So, analytics is done
regularly by people on desk. (Interview)

Likewise, Suhail, the editor of DoolNews, pointed out that many media
houses shut down holding on to traditional editorial judgement practices
and when they failed to realise the salience of new ways of doing journal-
ism apparently including analytics/algorithms. DoolNews altered its
 8 JOURNALISTIC PRACTICES AND ALGORITHMIC GOVERNANCE 169

strategy from presenting only hyperlocal stories of social and political rel-
evance to paying heed to analytics and publishing stories on
entertainment:

Many media houses, which came recently finally had to shut down. Even
Dool, as well. It was saved because there was a change in its strategy. Dool
was political at first … But it got registered as a company with having more
public interest news. (Interview)

To recapitulate, journalists use a range of digital technologies, tools,

apps and social media to produce and deliver news stories. Engaging in a
multitude of tasks, journalists in the three outlets produce multimodal
stories using mobile phones and other technologies. In a post-Fordist
sense, multiskilling has resulted in journalists enjoying their freedom and
at the same time has caused newsrooms to shrink with a few journalists in
digitally born news websites carrying out multiple tasks. Notably, the use
of social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and
WhatsApp among others have shaped the journalistic practices at the three
outlets. Social media have become the quintessential component in con-
temporary journalism while one cannot negate the extended labour pro-
cess they have ushered in for journalists. Analytical tools used by journalists
in the three news outlets provide granular and detailed data regarding the
shifting trends in news consumption, which become resourceful in strate-
gising the construction and dissemination of news stories. Thus journal-
ism, in today’s context, is characterised by a socio-technical formation
wherein the exercise of news production is performed by a combination of
human (journalists, citizens, etc.) and non-human actors (technologies,
algorithm/analytics, etc.) collectively and collaboratively.

Journalistic Practices and Algorithmic Governance

The onset of new media technologies has made the role of a journalist
more inclusive pointing to multi-tasking journalistic practices in the digital
age. As a result, strait-jacketed classifications of journalists based on their
designations and responsibilities are getting erased. What is acknowledged
today are the broadening capabilities of a professional journalist to pro-
duce information by engaging with social media, analytics, messenger
apps, CMS tools and so on. One of the commonalities that Oneindia,
DoolNews and Ippodhu share is that all three news organisations
170 M. S. M. HANEEF AND A. A. KHAN

outsource a part of their work to freelancers. Further, using social media,

they have resorted to transferring some of the burden of creating content
to users (Briziarelli 2011). The unpaid labour of users and the user-gener-
ated content has had a cascading effect on journalists resulting in layoffs,
shrinking editorials and the birth of new digitally native websites. Field
reporting for Oneindia is taken care of by freelance content writers. On
the contrary, journalists at DoolNews and Ippodhu produce news as well
as engage in multi-tasking. Ippodhu does not rely on news agencies but
generates its own reports as well as curates stories from other digital
sources.
The two news websites and the news portal illustrate that journalists,
apart from carrying out institutionalised traditional canons of newsroom
practices, have also become content curators and aggregators. While this
does not signal the outright collapse of traditional principles, outsourcing
of writing news stories of the day by Oneindia bears out that that the digi-
tal labour of journalists has altered the institutional scope of the digitally
native news industry. Oneindia is founded on the principle of generating
content that will in turn beget advertising revenues. The ideologies of
DoolNews and Ippodhu are not to get fixated on huge profits but func-
tion as alternative news outlets in digital format. Further, they are sup-
ported by the funding agency Independent and Public Spirited Media
Foundation (IPSMF) on conditions that the two websites would focus on
publishing stories of public interest.
DoolNews, Ippodhu and Oneindia use Google Analytics to identify its
specific audiences visiting its website. While DoolNews presented that
they would like to put editorial judgement before algorithms, the editor
accepted that they were open to changes. All three news outlets also derive
users’ data from social media pages also. All three news outlets focus on
producing cultural goods, which are later valourised. All journalists keep
tabs on stories that perform well and that do not. Journalists at DoolNews
experience precarious conditions as one is not certain which stories would
perform. While decisions are made to remove some of the non-­performing
stories, it does not mean that editorial agency is overshadowed by analyt-
ics; rather human intelligence is tempered with technological inputs.
Work does not take place in a specific geographic environment as the
spatial nature of the labour process is exacerbated through digital tools
used in newsrooms. In this context, labour must be understood in spatial
terms where the emphasis is on “spatial economies”. The three news out-
lets have their presence in social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter,
 8 JOURNALISTIC PRACTICES AND ALGORITHMIC GOVERNANCE 171

WhatsApp and YouTube. The news outlets have integrated social media
extensively into journalistic practices. This negates the idea of newsroom
space while multiplying spatial possibilities for news production and distri-
bution across different media and digital tools. Interestingly, the faraway
and the nearby, the disparate and the homologous spaces are thrown
together in producing affective news spaces. The spatial economies can
also be explained by field reporting at Oneindia largely outsourced to free-
lancers from all over the world. DoolNews publishes articles written by
activists and experts. When they are embedded in social media, they
acquire a degree of profusion through sharing, collocation and collabora-
tion. The labour thus becomes recursive in which journalists and audience
as humans and algorithms, Big Data and digital technologies as non-­
humans assemble (Latour 2005).
Readers of all three news outlets produce content in the form of news
stories, opinion pieces, photographs or videos, apart from sharing and lik-
ing, all of which constitute free labour. The editor of Ippodhu said that the
news outlet is an independent news media space designed to promote
democratic media where people can express their ideas freely. However,
looking at it through the lens of Christian Fuch’s concept of immaterial
labour, readers come across as prosumers. By the logic of prosumption,
users are consumers and are also the consumed or they become commodi-
ties (Smythe 1981). The labour put in by users and journalists is black-­
boxed in an environment of impenetrable codes, files and algorithms. All
three digital news outlets subsist on the collaborative labour of journalists
and users, a combination of waged labour and free labour. Benkler terms
the social and collaborative production as commons-based peer produc-
tion wherein contributors are not compensated (2006). It is also a combi-
nation of market production and commons-based peer production in that
journalists are paid incentives for performing their tasks while users are
encouraged to be part of news production without any financial reward.
Free labour performed by users in this context, is part of social-technical
assemblages (Terranova 2000).
While co-creation of content by journalists and users might have altered
journalistic work, we tend to overlook the precariousness of journalistic
work on the one hand and users on the other. The technology such as
Facebook is a private property on which users build public goods which
are again converted into private good for monetisation. Algorithms of
Facebook thus aid in the proliferation of free labour. It is the algorithm of
Facebook that journalists work with to collect individuals together and
172 M. S. M. HANEEF AND A. A. KHAN

create communities for their news stories. Social media are thus marked by
affective (Hardt and Negri 2000) and emotional labour (Hochschild
2003). The affective labour of Ippodhu, DoolNews and Oneindia journal-
ists presuppose their investment of time and effort in building communi-
ties on social media. The artillery of technologies used in journalistic
practices—which includes software, analytics and other tools founded on
algorithms—is driving the automation of labour. Nonetheless, to say that
journalists set their fundamental qualities aside and simply succumb to the
designs of analytics or algorithms is perhaps little too trite. Advancing a
more optimistic ontology, research studies need to recognise the com-
bined capacities of human subjects and algorithmic governance used in the
production, distribution and consumption of digital news content.

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 CHAPTER 9

Inequalities in Ride-Hailing Platforms

Ravinder Kumar Verma, P. Vigneswara Ilavarasan,

and Arpan Kumar Kar

The business models of the emerging digital economy supposedly provide

equal opportunities to all stakeholders in the market. Contrary to this, we
argue in this chapter that structural inequalities exist in digital economy
interactions. Using the case of ride-hailing platforms (RHPs) Uber and
Ola in New Delhi, India, we show that the projected symbiotic relation-
ships between the RHP, the drivers, and the customers are not equally
beneficial. Specifically, our study focuses on the rating mechanisms that
constitute algorithmic governance within RHP platforms. Our study uses
data collected through qualitative interviews with RHP drivers in New
Delhi and a sample of the drivers’ rating data. The study finds that drivers
bear the brunt of consequences within the rating systems. The algorithm
appears to replicate traditional critiques of the interactions between work-
ers and employers under capitalism. The mechanism of discipline via the
rating systems exerts considerable power over the drivers, but not their
customers. We argue that limited resources and unequal power biases in

R. K. Verma (*) • P. Vigneswara Ilavarasan • A. K. Kar

Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi, India
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 177

A. Athique, V. Parthasarathi (eds.), Platform Capitalism in India,
Global Transformations in Media and Communication Research - A
Palgrave and IAMCR Series,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44563-8_9
178 R. K. VERMA ET AL.

the digital economy favour the platform operators and customers differ-
ently from platform workers.
Ride-hailing platforms (RHPs) have transformed the way taxi services
are offered. RHPs have adopted a lean business model with limited or no
ownership of assets, by mobilizing human and other physical resources on
a large scale to deliver their services. The major players are Ola and Uber
in India who are providing daily 3.65 million rides and have more than 1
million drivers (Shrivastava 2019). They have changed the way people
book taxis, the technology involved, number of customers and drivers,
and precipitated changes in regulations. The ride-haling ecosystem
involves the following stakeholders: customers, drivers, platform opera-
tors, government, banking institutions, technology partners, and vehicle
manufacturers. RHPs, under the ethos of the emerging digital economy,
claim to offer equal opportunity for stakeholders. Customers enjoy greater
choice, convenience, and access to taxis. RHPs claim to be enabling
employment opportunities, along with freedom and choices for drivers.
During the initial phase of RHPs, drivers were able to earn more than Rs.
100,000 ($1413.68) per month in India, and many drivers joined RHPs
to gain a higher income.
Initially, both drivers and customers were offered substantial incentives
by the RHPs. However, as the market has grown, these incentives and
offers are being decreased or removed (Ravikumar et al. 2019). As aca-
demic research begins to focus upon the maturing phase of RHPs, differ-
ent perspectives are emerging. Some studies suggest that drivers are
exploited and are not able to earn the minimum wage, while other studies
suggest that both employment opportunities and automobile sales have
increased in certain urban centres. The present study focuses upon algo-
rithmic governance of RHPS, through the reciprocal rating systems used
by the RHPs. In the RHP rating system, the customer gives a rating to the
driver post trip, and the driver gives a rating to the customer. Drivers are
expected to maintain a minimum rating to continue working for the plat-
form, and higher ratings accrue better work allocations. Driver ratings by
customers are thus used as inputs for algorithmic governance of the avail-
able drivers. The ratings of customers given by drivers are also supposedly
used for allotting ride allocations and access to priority services. Alongside
the mutual ratings of drivers and customers, the RHP algorithms also
employ other parameters, such as availability of taxis, geographical area,
number of ride requests in play, and traffic conditions to determine ride
allocation.
 9 INEQUALITIES IN RIDE-HAILING PLATFORMS 179

Digital Platforms, Digital Labour, and Interactions

Digital platforms are intermediaries that connect two or more individuals
or groups and enable the online transaction of services between them. The
platforms may or may not charge fees for enabling the transaction. The
platforms typically use automated data collection and analysis processes to
determine the prices, markets, products, and respond to customers. These
forms of “platform capitalism” are considered to be a new mode of orga-
nizing markets through digital infrastructure and data (Srnicek 2017).
Digital platforms have transformed service delivery in many areas like hos-
pitality, mobility, education, social media, and public service (Martin 2016).
In terms of capitalization, digital platforms have surpassed the growth of
many traditional industries in recent years (Leismann et al. 2013; Matzler
and Kathan 2015). In the attendant platform economy, digital labour can
be both paid and unpaid, and can be categorized into cloud work and gig
work (Heeks 2017). The former is web-based and can be done from any
place via the internet, while the latter is tied to a particular location, time,
and person. The taxi drivers associated with RHP platforms thus fall under
the gig work category, where digital platforms are supported by a flexible,
lean, and cost-effective digital labour market (Schmidt 2017).
In this respect, the digital economy is often criticized for extending the
exploitative aspects of capitalism, through the casualization of labour, lack
of transparency, and unequal sharing of resources. The regulatory ambi-
guities of digitally mediated operations have also led to charges of tax
avoidance, unfair competition, and risk transfers to stakeholders (Martin
2016). Although the digital economy encourages an entrepreneurial envi-
ronment, individual freedom and work choices, there are many concerns
related to a lack of fair work standards and unequal distribution of profits.
In the platform economy as a whole, providers of digital labour have
mixed experiences of the automated market conditions (Friedman 2014).
In many cases, the controlling mechanisms of the digital economy have
stripped way the bargaining power of digital labour, resulting in more
extensive and arbitrary control over the working conditions of digital
labour. Competition among the providers of digital labour is shifting their
income standards to a lower level. While negotiating with the fulfilment of
immediate needs, and diminishing returns per task, the future sustainabil-
ity of digital labour appears to be at risk (Malhotra and Van Alstyne 2014).
Thus, arguably, the present form of the digital economy is biased towards
the operators of digital platforms rather than the producers of goods and
services (Graham and Hjorth 2017).
180 R. K. VERMA ET AL.

In essence, digital platforms follow variants of a “lean” business model,

where there is no direct hiring of employees or ownership of assets. RHPs
address their drivers as “partners”, and provide no/ limited contracts or
liabilities for them, unlike more traditional contractual arrangements
between employers and employees (Rosenblat and Stark 2016). At the
same time, digital platforms have standardized their business processes
around mechanisms where price coordination is attuned to demand and
supply in real time (Blal et al. 2018). These processes of optimization
operate alongside the algorithmic standardization of their logistical opera-
tions. Thus, this business model fosters both cost reduction and faster
expansion of the market (Hahn and Metcalfe 2017). Consequently, the
following factors are critical for the success of RHPs: increasing the net-
works of the customers and drivers, effective customer support services,
and building the trust of stakeholders (Belk 2014) and retention (Kumar
et al. 2018). Consumer loyalty towards platform services is influenced by
satisfaction and service quality (Cheng et al. 2018, p. 58; Bijarnia et al.
2020). However, an increasing number of transactions in the digital econ-
omy poses a challenge to maintain service quality. Through the use of
algorithms, platforms have shifted the burden of service quality standard-
ization to their stakeholders. In the case of RHPs, this is primarily achieved
through peer to peer ratings. Here, managerial quality control is replaced
by algorithm based instructions for the management of drivers (Gandini
2019; Schmidt 2017). Consequently, the inclusion and exclusion of ser-
vice providers and recipients in the digital economy are determined by the
inputs of ratings, feedback, and work history. The standardization of oper-
ations via algorithmic governance leads to disparities of equality between
digital labour and customers, and to the compartmentalization of produc-
tion and consumption from the cognition of individuals and society. In
some instances, there is moral injury inflicted, where the algorithmic pro-
cesses of platform businesses conceal the logics of their operations from
their users, workers and the wider society (Hill 2019).

Ride-Hailing Platforms (RHPs) in Delhi

The significant players in ride-hailing space are Ola and Uber in India. Ola
started its operation in 2010–2011 and is present in 110 cities. Uber has
operations in India since 2013 and it is currently operating in 40 cities.
Before the arrival of RHP in India, taxi services were offered by licensed
“black and yellow” (kaali-peeli) taxis, and by few “radio taxi” operators
 9 INEQUALITIES IN RIDE-HAILING PLATFORMS 181

such as Meru and Mega cabs. There are no road side hailing taxis in New
Delhi. Customers were thus dependent on neighbourhood taxi stands, or
radio taxi services. New taxi regulations were introduced in Delhi to rec-
ognize radio taxis, under the Radio Taxi Scheme in 2006, Economic
Radio Taxi Scheme 2010, and City Taxi Scheme 2015. The latter regula-
tions also recognized digital platforms in transportation services
(Transport-Dept 2015). In New Delhi, the transportation sector is regu-
lated by the Delhi transport department under the Motor Vehicles Act
1988. The government exercises its control on the number of taxis in
operation in the city, location of operations, taxi permits, and calculation
of fares. They also regulate parameters such as vehicle age, mechanical
condition, and fuel used, and ensure the compulsory instalment of devices
like electric meter, global positioning system (GPS), security button, and
fire extinguisher.
The advent of RHPs provided doorstep taxi services, where customers
can book taxis using their smartphone application (app). The RHP app
calculates the approximate fare and connects the customer with a nearby
matching taxi. If the driver accepts the ride request, he then moves towards
the rider’s pick-up location using the GPS instructions enabled in the
RHP app. The controlling mechanisms differ fundamentally between tra-
ditional taxi players and RHP taxis, which are based upon peer review of
service quality, digital records of trips, and dynamic pricing in real-time.
After reaching the customer’s pick-up location, the driver starts the ride
[in the case of Ola ride, by asking the one-time password (OTP) shared
with the customer, the driver puts the OTP in the app to start the trip].
After reaching the drop location, the RHP app indicates the arrival and
trip completion function appears in the app that shows due fare. The pay-
ment can be made in online and offline modes. After the trip completion,
a rating option pops up in the app of the driver and the customer.
Algorithmic taxi controls have now become a multi-polar mechanism
under the ambit of ride-hailing platforms (RHPs), the state transportation
department, and central government regulations.

Rating System in RHPs

RHPs have a reciprocal rating system where, after the completion of the
ride, the customer rates the driver and the driver rates the customer. Above
this, the RHP operators offer customer care support and in-app support
for both drivers and customers. RHP driver rating systems have different
182 R. K. VERMA ET AL.

specifications: In case of Ola, customers have up to five stars rating options

for the drivers. They can also opt for a compliment from among a list that
includes pre-defined options like “polite and professional driver”, “on-­
time pick-up”, “comfortable feature-rich car”, “driver familiar with the
route”, and “value for money”, or “my reason is not listed”, with an
option to add any other reason/comment in the given space. In case of
Uber, customers can give up to five stars, and they can add complements
(badges) like “six-star service”, “expert navigation”, “great attitude”,
“neat and clean”, “great conversation”, “hero”, “great amenities”, or they
can write another compliment. In the case of Ola, only cumulative star
ratings of drivers are visible to other customers while booking. In the case
of Uber, along with the star ratings, a detailed rating of the driver is visi-
ble, which includes ratings, the number of trips completed, six stars
received by the customers, duration of the association with the RHP,
badges received and comments. To rate the customer, in both Ola and
Uber, drivers can choose out of five stars and comment about the cus-
tomer. An example of an Uber driver’s ratings is presented in Table 9.1.
In this sample Uber driver rating, out of the total lifetime trips of 1317,
a total of 662 trips were rated by the customers. Around 50% of the cus-
tomers gave a rating to the driver. Besides ratings, the driver received 12
comments and 58 badges, which includes following badges: 436
stars badge, 9 great attitude badge, 3 hero badge, 3 neat and clean badge.
The RHP provides online and offline training to the drivers on service
delivery instructions. Training involves instructions for the driving behav-
iour, reaching the pickup location on time; wishing and opening the gate
for the customers, keeping the luggage, maintaining a clean car and keep-
ing the air conditioner in a good condition.

Table 9.1 Sample rat-

Number of stars given by the customers Percentage of
ings of an Uber driver customers (%)

5 86
4 8
3 2
2 1
1 3
 9 INEQUALITIES IN RIDE-HAILING PLATFORMS 183

Digital Records: Algorithmic Management

Algorithmic management goes beyond the digitalization of taxi services.
Data inputs include customer details, feedback about drivers and custom-
ers, taxi movements, speed of taxis, type of taxis, records of taxis, docu-
mentation of drivers’ registration, information on routes, real-time traffic
records, pick-up and drop location, real-time information of demand and
availability of cabs. The RHPs use these data points to manage their opera-
tions. To maintain the service quality and standards, RHPs use the digital
records of the ratings and feedbacks as inputs to improve service delivery
for the drivers and customers. These ratings and feedback are acting as the
inputs for the algorithmic system for the drivers, and it decides the amount
and frequency of work, type of customers (low- or high-rated customers),
and service type of ride requests. Similarly, for the customers, the algorith-
mic system will decide and allocate a taxi with a low- or high-­rated driver
in less or more duration of time. The rating records of the drivers influ-
enced the work they received. If a driver has good ratings, then the driver
receives a good number of rides requests. One of the drivers mentioned that

the ratings influence the number of rides received by me. Now I have low
ratings, and I was not receiving as many ride requests as I used to receive
previously. To get a good number of ride requests, I need to drive properly
for the next 3–4 months to improve my ratings. (Interview)

The number of algorithmic inputs to decide the service rules/standards

is higher for drivers than customers. If drivers have good driving behav-
iour and fewer cancellations, then that results in good ratings. Overall the
ratings that a driver gets is decided by the customers, and the company
policies, and it is influenced by factors including cancellation of rides,
complaints, and diversity in service delivery (Uberinsights 2019). Drivers
need to maintain a minimum rating to receive a specific type of service
request. Many times the ride-hailing online applications fail to judge the
real conditions well. The algorithmic errors or biases often result in incon-
venience for the drivers. There are times when there is a mismatch between
the drivers’ data and that of the RHP. These differences in the data and
errors in the software make the driver suffer. One of the drivers mentioned:
184 R. K. VERMA ET AL.

I dropped a passenger by driving 15 km, whereas the RHP app was showing
only 5 km of the distance between the pickup and drop location. RHP app
calculated fare for 5 km, which was around Rs. 114 ($1.59), whereas that
should be around Rs. 300–350 ($4.18–4.88). (Interview)

Even after raising a complaint with the RHP, the driver had to bear the
loss in this case. In many such cases, the company fails to empathize with
the driver’s situation, sometimes leading to monetary loss and state of dis-
satisfaction towards the work. The issues seem to be more in the shared
cab services where more than one passenger can book the same taxi. Each
of the commuters might get picked and dropped in different locations and
pay different fares. In shared services, the drivers and customers do not
have much control over the ride allocations. The app allocates the taxis
and routes. Once the driver accepts the ride request, the app takes over.
The probability of a mismatch with the real conditions remains high, often
because of location marker errors and poor coverage of mobile phones and
the practical inability of following multiple instructions while driving:

The app [RHP] accepted a share ride request and cab was moving with
other share passengers. After reaching the destination of customers, the app
[RHP] was showing that I have dropped three share customers instead of
two and deducted money from my account. However, I did not receive any
money from the invisible passenger, but I had to pay the commission to the
company [RHP]. (Interview)

This driver mentioned that he complained about the incidence to the

RHP, but the RHP apparently told him that profit and loss is a part of the
business and drivers ought to deal with their losses. Many times, drivers
also have to deal with the insensitive behaviour of the customers. One
driver mentioned:

We are supposed to pick and drop the customers based on the location men-
tioned in the app. The same is not possible always, for instance, customers
call the cab inside the narrow streets and it is tough to get inside such nar-
row streets. Customers keep telling that they kept the location of their house
doorstep. (Interview)

The GPS location tracker is not always able to comprehend cab move-
ment feasibility. To quote a driver: “if we get stuck in a street and cause
damage to the taxi, we have to bear the losses.” RHP taxis also have to pay
 9 INEQUALITIES IN RIDE-HAILING PLATFORMS 185

an entry fee to enter some locations, like state boundaries and airports. If
there is a mismatch between the customer location and the one that the
app is indicating, the driver ends up paying the stipulated amount. Another
kind of monetary loss for the driver is when the customer books on cash
payment and later cancels. This matters when the driver has already paid
to access the location. A driver narrated:

I entered the terminal 1 of the New Delhi airport by paying an entry fee of
Rs. 150 ($2.09). When I called the customer, then the customer replied that
he was standing at terminal 2. I told the customer that the location of the
pickup is terminal 1, then the customer cancelled the ride. I have to pay the
entry fee from my pocket as the company did not receive any money, then
they [RHP] will not pay to us. (Interview)

Ownership of Resources
In theory, driver ownership of resources (as the means of production) acts
as a buffer to absorb the shocks of inequalities in the digital economy.
Thus, the patterns of resource ownership aspect become critical to under-
standing power relations in the digital economy. In our research, we found
various types of resource ownership amongst RHP drivers, including the
following:

1. The driver owns the taxi and gets the net income after deducting
RHP commission and taxi maintenance cost.
2. RHP owns the taxi and provides it to one driver on rent. The driver
pays a daily rent (around Rs. 1000 ($14.01), depending on the taxi
type) to RHP, RHP commission and bears the fuel cost. Uber lets
the drivers have an option to convert the taxi in their name after
three years.
3. RHP owns the taxi, provides it on rent and multiple drivers use same
taxi. One driver takes a cab from RHP on daily rent and two or
more drivers are driving the cab on a shared basis. In this category,
the cab is running for 24 hours and cost to the drivers are daily rent,
fuel cost, and RHP commission.
4. A third-party vendor owns the taxi and hires a driver. The driver gets
a monthly salary and the owner takes care of taxi-related expenses.
186 R. K. VERMA ET AL.

Based on the nature of resource ownership, ratings have a different

impact upon drivers. A higher grade of resource ownership makes the
driver more accountable for its ratings. In contrast, where resources are
owned by the RHP or a third party drivers are less worried about their
ratings and work relations. We were told:

It is not profitable to hire a driver to drive for the company [RHP]. A sala-
ried driver is not/less worried about the work, even if he does not work,
then also he will get a salary in the month-end. Also, a hired driver would
not go to those places where chances of getting rides are higher. (Interview)

On the other hand, higher grade of ownership can potentially work in

favour of the driver, since it provides flexibility in terms of income oppor-
tunities and time resource management. If the driver owns a taxi and other
liabilities related to payment of the loan and rent are low, then he can
potentially be in a better position to negotiate with other aspects of life
like family and health. To quote a driver:

I am the owner of this taxi, and I do not have to pay any loan to the bank. I
am working for 10–12 hours starting at 8 am, and I return by 7–8 pm. I am
spending time with my family, children, and I do not bother about complet-
ing the incentive target. (Interview)

Resource ownership becomes a significant factor in calculating the

potential work stress for a driver working with the RHPs. This is impor-
tant, since frequent incidents causing stress and monetary loss drain a
driver’s resources and energy and lead to job dissatisfaction. One of the
drivers mentioned:

I am working with the app [the RHP] for the last three years. Once I repay
the taxi loan, then I will convert this taxi into a private car and will leave this
driving profession. (Interview)

In the ride-hailing ecosystem, the platforms operators initial focus was

on increasing the number of drivers and customers. Thus, this driver also
noted that he was dissatisfied with the RHP due to their reduction of
incentives and increases in the number of taxis, which forced drivers to
work for longer hours to achieve their income targets. Systematically, the
increasing number of drivers and their investment in vehicles via financing
 9 INEQUALITIES IN RIDE-HAILING PLATFORMS 187

has impelled a power shift towards RHPs and customers. Another driver
mentioned that he needs to complete 48 trips in four days to get an incen-
tive, “[T]oday is the last day to complete my incentive target, and I need
to work for longer hours, else my whole incentive will go away.”

Power Relations in the RHP Ecosystem

RHPs require drivers and customers to regulate the service quality through
instigating a reciprocal mechanism between the rating system and incen-
tives regime. However, the drivers, whom RHPs refer to as “business part-
ners”, claimed that while customers concerns are listened to, those of
driver-partners are not, since

[n]ow, many taxis are working with the company [RHP], and the company
[RHP] will not be hurt if some of the cabs stopped working. However, our
interest is at the stake as we have to repay the bank loan and earn a living.
(Interview)

Though RHP claims to provide a minimum business guarantee to driv-

ers, with increasing number of drivers, the dependency on RHP has cre-
ated an environment of unequal bargaining power between the drivers,
RHP and customers. A driver lamented:

[C]ompany [RHP] will not do anything to customers but reduce our incen-
tives and keep penalty on us. Company [RHP] should put a penalty on
customers for their misbehaviour. But RHP representatives are saying, how
we can track the customers? In some cases, when customers are not paying
ride fare. After making a complaint against such a customer, even then, the
company [RHP] will not do anything. (Interview)

In New Delhi, many drivers are migrating on a daily and weekly basis
from neighbouring states like Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Rajasthan, and
Punjab. These migrant drivers tend to have lesser resources than New-­
Delhi-­based drivers. New Delhi drivers have opportunities to work simul-
taneously with other firms or can shift to a regular job, which offers them
more bargaining power. Migrant drivers have limited choices and are
dependent on the RHP system. The growing contingent of migrant labour
has also shifted the power balance towards RHPs and customers. One
driver said:
188 R. K. VERMA ET AL.

I migrated from Uttar Pradesh and living along with other drivers in a
rented room in Delhi. I borrowed money to pay for a taxi. Now I have
financial liabilities for repayment of taxi and support my family. My native
place has no employment. I must work here. Though I like the app [RHP]
driving, which enables me to earn. (Interview)

The differences in driver’s ratings are also an institutional cause of

inequalities. Lower-rated drivers receive delayed ride requests, often from
low-rated customers, while high-rated drivers get access to high-rated cus-
tomers and more frequent ride offers. One driver said that when he has
low ratings, “I need to move to different locations to get the ride requests”.
Another driver with a rating of 4.84 said: “I am receiving the rides request
in advance (before completing the existing trip), and sometimes I do not
have time to eat food, and I need to sign out from the app [RHP] to eat
food.” The relationship between ratings and work exacerbates inequalities
during peak hours, and in surcharge zones, where bargaining power
accrues to high-rated drivers rather than low-rated drivers.
The use of online portals to raise grievances is prominently oriented
towards customers. The details of errant drivers are often revealed by cus-
tomers in public forums (such as social media platforms). In the case of
Ola, a total of 7098 complaints were registered online, out of which 120
got resolved, and most of those complaints were filed by the customers
(Consumercomplaints.in 2019). The RHPs appear to treat the grievances
of customers and drivers on an unequal basis. Based on customer com-
plaints, drivers are penalized by monetary deductions, reduced work and
the blocking of drivers’ accounts. To remain on RHP platforms, drivers
need to maintain at least four star ratings, which is just one star less than
the highest possible. Below that level, a driver’s account will be deacti-
vated. This treatment of drivers causes them to question their agency
within the ride-haling ecosystem:

Company [RHP] is putting all kinds of restrictions on drivers. Now we

caught in the web, what kind of business partners we are? If the company
[RHP] is not able to resolve our issues. Drivers are listening to both custom-
ers and the company [RHP]. What else can we do? We have to work.
(Interview)

Ratings influence the drivers’ position and perception about the rela-
tions with the customers and RHP. Drivers feel that they are dependent on
the customer feedback. To quote: “Yes, rating influences us; we always
 9 INEQUALITIES IN RIDE-HAILING PLATFORMS 189

remain in fear that company [RHP] can remove us.” Concerns about rat-
ings make drivers nervous about raising any of their own concerns. RHPs
provide instructions to drivers about problem behaviours by customers,
like smoking in the taxi, using abusive language, and not settling fares
before starting a shared ride. However, raising their concerns about such
behaviours by customers remains difficult for drivers:

The feedback system made us dependent on the customers. The moment

customers entered the cab and we remain in fear. Despite our good service,
customers give fewer ratings. What is our fault? In some cases, customers
misbehave and make the wrong complaint against me, then company [RHP]
penalizes me. (Interview)

Drivers fear that customers can file false complaints against them and a
lack of responsiveness by the RHPs can leave the drivers frustrated. One of
the drivers told us:

Once a customer filed a wrong complained against me. Then I received a

call from the company [RHP] to know about the incidence. Then I told the
whole incidence then RHP executive told me to continue driving and
behave properly without keeping any penalty on me. Despite the wrong
complaint, RHP cannot do anything to the customer. (Interview)

The RHP operators’ response to the drivers’ grievances and the inabil-
ity of RHP to control customer behaviours puts drivers in a weaker posi-
tion. The biased redress process leads to dissatisfaction. The drivers’
dissatisfaction results in the attrition of drivers or the joining of other
RHPs (Variyar and Sachdev 2019). A driver shared the following account:

My previous RHP put penalties on me and deduct money from my account.

They [RHP] are not responding properly and I was not able to understand
why they are doing so. Therefore, I left that company [RHP], and my cur-
rent ride-hailing platform has a transparent payment system. (Interview)

Drivers invariably give higher ratings to the customers because they

believe that customers ratings are very important for them. Most of the
drivers said that they always give high ratings to customers. To quote a
driver: “Even if a customer misbehaves, I am giving five stars to them. We
are driving with the company to get work and earn our living.” The impact
of instances of dissatisfaction is felt differently through reciprocal ratings
190 R. K. VERMA ET AL.

by drivers and customers. If the driver receives lower ratings from custom-
ers, then that will reduce the driver’s overall rating, negatively impacting
their ride offers. In case of the customers, however, low ratings from the
drivers have little or no impact upon their access to the service. One of the
drivers expressed his dissatisfaction with some of the ratings he had
received from the customers and was angry about the rating system, say-
ing: “Why should I give five stars to customers when they are giving fewer
ratings to me?”

Regulation, Inclusion, and Exclusion

In India, regulatory institutions are different across issues relating to
labour, transportation, and consumer grievances. RHPs are registered as a
technology company and drivers are designated as partners of the firm.
Due to this configuration, public transportation laws do apply to drivers,
but not to the RHPs. Critically, there are no labour-related regulatory
obligations for the RHPs, and the service conditions of drivers are primar-
ily determined by their algorithmic instructions. Consequently, the work-
ing conditions RHP drivers are not regulated by labour laws, despite the
RHP effectively controlling their labour through algorithmic manage-
ment. RHP algorithms determine the number and type of rides a driver
can take, who can enter the platform and the payments received. Further,
the rating system is a quality mechanism for managerial control over driv-
ers. If a driver’s rating falls below a certain point, then an automatic train-
ing session is started by the app. Without completing that session, a driver
cannot drive for the RHP. Despite not being considered as employers,
RHPs also manage drivers’ behaviour through their training of drivers.
RHPs have details of driver’s account, their movements, trips, records of
driving pattern and duration spent in the RHP system. The digitalization
of services makes it difficult for a deactivated driver to leave RHP and re-­
join later using a similar license or documents. Other than documented
identity, RHP drivers are also required to prove their identity using face
recognition technology. If a driver’s account is deactivated due to a com-
plaint or low rating, the driver needs to visit RHP office to receive further
training or a warning.
In the digital economy, peer to peer ratings enable the service quality
and building trust in the system through discipline and control mecha-
nisms. RHP, through ratings controlling the drivers and customers’ inclu-
sion and exclusion. RHPs have more control over the drivers than the
 9 INEQUALITIES IN RIDE-HAILING PLATFORMS 191

customers. RHP control leads to the experience of inclusion and exclusion

by the drivers, not by the customers. In the case of drivers, when ratings
fall below a standard, then the driver will be removed from the platform.
In terms of control, RHP imposed penalties on drivers, reduce their rat-
ings, reduce their work, and give rewards to higher-rated drivers. RHP
driver mentioned that “based on the customer ratings and feedback, we
are receiving work. Now my rating is good and receiving ride requests
before completing the existing trip. Previously advanced ride request was
stopped and started again after improvement in ratings.” Ratings influence
the amount of work and kind of work received by digital labour and sub-
sequent continuance in the platforms. Drivers need to maintain a mini-
mum of 4.7-star ratings to be eligible to deliver specific services like prime
and rental services. One of the drivers was saying that to improve his rat-
ings, he needs to work correctly for the next three months: “I have to
drive without cancelling the rides and take a greater number of rides to
improve my ratings to receive a prime ride request.”
The relations between the drivers’ ratings and work they received also
determine their incentives. According to a driver there are two targets to
meet in a week—four days’ duration from Monday to Thursday to com-
plete 40 trips to get an incentive of Rs. 1500 ($20.98) and a duration of
three days from Friday to Sunday to complete 44 trips to receive an incen-
tive of Rs. 1800 ($25.17). The high or low ratings of drivers determine
work allocation, and thus the capacity to achieve their targets. Ride alloca-
tion also depends upon the kind and quality of cars owned by the drivers.
RHPs favour new taxis compared to old taxis and taxis owned by them.
One driver mentioned that “company gives more ride requests to new
taxis compare to the old taxis”. Another driver added: “Suppose, if two
taxis are standing. Then ride request will come first on company taxi rather
than another driver taxi [out of those two taxies, one taxi belong to RHP
and other is of driver].” These strategies serve the RHP’s interests but
work against a group of drivers. The ratings determine the exclusion from
the exclusion. Once a driver excluded, then it is difficult to reregister with
the same driving license without intervention by the RHP. Some drivers
were driving using other’s accounts as their accounts are blocked.
Drivers are not allowed to offer prime services when their ratings fall
below 4.7 stars, unlike the customers. However, one of the drivers men-
tioned that ratings have little effect on his business. When his rating reduced
to 4.64, RHP stopped particular services like prime and rental, he is
unaware of why he is not getting prime and rental bookings which he used
192 R. K. VERMA ET AL.

to receive in the past. The exclusion of drivers to offer a particular type of

taxi service further excludes them from achieving their incentive targets.
The cancellation of rides leads to loss for both drivers and customers.
However, the effective penalty is higher for the drivers compared to the
customers. Drivers need to bear the physical, psychological, and financial
loss in the cancellation of rides. To control their drivers’ behaviour, RHPs
allow only a limited number of cancellations by drivers, around 10% of the
total rides. Thus, if we consider the incentive target, then drivers need to
complete around 10–12 rides a day, from RHP10% cancellations relaxation
to a driver account to one ride. Drivers drive for 3–5 km on an average to
reach the customers’ pickup locations. Customers can cancel the ride within
5 minutes of booking without any cancellation fee. In many cases, the
driver does not receive any compensation. In contrast, the driver accepted
the ride, prepared mentally to have a trip, already started towards the cus-
tomer’s pick-up location, and covered some distance but receive no money
if a customer cancels the ride. One of the drivers mentioned:

I was about to reach the pickup location of the customer; then the customer
cancelled the ride. In that case, the company [RHP] will not give anything
to me. To receive the cancellation fee, I need to reach the pick up location
and wait there before cancellation. Platform [RHP] even take their commis-
sion from the cancellation fee. In the cancellation fee of Rs. 42 ($0.59) out
of which they (RHP) keep Rs. 11 ($0.15) with them and give Rs. 31 ($0.43)
to the driver.

In some cases, customers cancel the rides after five minutes, on the basis
that the driver has exceeded the estimated arrival time. In such cases,
RHPs waive the cancellation fee for customers. This also leads to RHPs
reducing the drivers’ ratings and/or penalizing them or suspending their
accounts. The drivers do get a chance to prove themselves not guilty, by
giving their reason for the delay and requesting the removal imposed pen-
alties. One driver mentioned an incidence, where the RHP imposed a
penalty on him because a customer claimed that the driver exceeded the
estimated arrival time. The driver raised the concern with the RHP, who
checked their records to establish that the driver’s cab was stuck in a traffic
jam, and then removed the penalty. However, drivers do not always get an
opportunity to relay their grievances. In most cases, algorithmic gover-
nance determines their income, completion of incentive targets, digital
records and freedom of work. These controlling mechanisms thereby sep-
arate the human elements from the responsibility of management and
reduce human services to a set of data standards for algorithmic inputs.
 9 INEQUALITIES IN RIDE-HAILING PLATFORMS 193

Lessons for the Digital Economy

The digital economy in India is flourishing in different sectors like
e-­commerce, education, mobility, public sector, and hospitality. The
Indian economy is facing challenges of decreasing the growth of employ-
ment in the organized sector decreasing GDP growth rate (GoI 2019a).
The majority of the jobs are supported by the unorganized sector (GoI
2018). The unorganized sector jobs lack economic stability with no or
little social security measures. The state of micro, small, and medium
enterprises (MSMEs), which have a significant share of employment (RBI
2019), is worrisome with declining growth or rampant closing of MSMEs
(Kandavel 2018). The variation in the minimum wages in India for differ-
ent kinds of jobs (GoI 2019b) leaves more significant space for the digital
economy to exploit the labour. In the above economic background, the
digital economy has created jobs in the market, but the quality of these
jobs is questionable. We might argue, however, that digital economy firms
are still in an initial stage, and struggling to achieve their breakeven point
(ET-Rise 2019). To sustain their operations, massive funding has to be
raised from private markets. Nonetheless, in the initial disruption of the
existing market, good incentives were offered to attract the customers and
drivers. These incentives, however, have proved not be a perennial feature
of ongoing business strategies. Consequently, the gradual removal of
incentives has reduced the income of drivers as the market becomes estab-
lished. By providing only limited or no incentives for the drivers and cus-
tomers, the RHPs are re-focusing on profits or, at least, reducing their
operating losses (ET-Rise 2019).
The differences in the laws in developed and developing countries lead
to a different digital economy ecosystem. In India, where the state trans-
portation department documents the taxis, drivers need to abide by the
regulations to register with the RHP. In the West, regulations permit pri-
vate cars to operate with the RHP. In India, the car should be registered
as a commercial vehicle with yellow number plate and have an emergency
button inside the taxi, a GPS, and a taxi meter (Vigneswara Ilavarasan
et al. 2018). Recently the Indian government has allowed private driving
license for RHP drivers (Das 2018). The limited resources ownership
(Erickson 2018), strict control over the drivers and differential treatment
to the customers have resulted in unequal space to the drivers. In India,
many RHP drivers are the first-time drivers and migrants from poor eco-
nomic background. The unequal treatment is hurting the drivers’
194 R. K. VERMA ET AL.

interests, despite that drivers continue with RHPs due to limited employ-
ment opportunities elsewhere. As a consequence of algorithmic gover-
nance, drivers give ratings to all the customers and are mostly higher
ratings. However, around 50% of the customers are rating the drivers. To
improve the rating, drivers need to work more as only half of customers
are rating. The drivers have an evident and ongoing fear of exclusion, a
sense of limited inclusion, and feeling of dependency.
Thus, it seems clear that algorithmic management in the digital econ-
omy puts the burden on the drivers. This burden on the drivers is further
amplified due to differential resource ownerships (Erickson 2018; Varma
2017). The customers do not share the drivers’ imperatives deliver the
desired quality services, negotiate road traffic conditions, manage number
of work hours, maintain drivers’ logs in the app, account for number of
kilometres driven, absorb losses from time spent stuck on congested roads,
idle time without ride requests, fluctuating cost of fuel in the car, calculat-
ing amount of money earned as profits, amount of money paid as commis-
sion to RHP and taxi documentations and so on. The experience of taxi
arrival is far different for drivers and customers, which means the apparent
congruence of rating systems is misleading. The ignorance of customers
regarding the physical logistics of taxi movement, margins and operational
processes while giving ratings to drivers often leads to biased inputs in the
algorithmic evaluation of drivers’ services. Our conclusions are that these
digital economy inequalities are a direct result of platforms policies and
the environment of operations. This is not to say that the previous trans-
port economy was not similarly marked by more or less institutionalised
inequalities. The emergence of RHP operators in Delhi has clearly brought
changes in both the travel behaviour of the customers and the driving
behaviour of the drivers. However, these changes have been largely favour-
able for the customers at the expense of RHP drivers. Based on the insights
gained from the research, we provide our conclusions under the following
points: algorithmic management, resource, power relations, institutions
and control:

1. Algorithmic discipline has transformed the relationships between

consumers, RHP, and drivers. The inputs received by the algorith-
mic system determine a system where drivers have the limited voice,
and drivers are dissatisfied with algorithmic errors and responses
from their RHP. The difference between the algorithmic system and
reality result in unfavourable conditions for drivers.
 9 INEQUALITIES IN RIDE-HAILING PLATFORMS 195

2. The ownership of resources creates inequalities, where drivers with

limited financial liabilities are in a better position to deal with risks
and losses. Resource ownership also influences the freedom of driv-
ers to manage their time and physical resources. The bargaining
power further of drivers is also limited by factors like migration and
other employment opportunities.
3. The standardization of service delivery through the ratings mecha-
nism creates a power imbalance between drivers and customers.
Ratings have no or limited consequences for the customers, whereas
drivers are dependent on the ratings. In the RHP ecosystem, power
relations are enforced by real-time data and individualised regula-
tory mechanisms, and the interactions between the RHP, custom-
ers, and drivers indicate unequal relations and voices.
4. There are multiple institutional arrangements for drivers, but only
limited regulation of RHP operators. Previously existing taxi sys-
tems in New Delhi maintain by multiple regulatory bodies for the
regulation of labour, taxis, grievances, training, incumbent taxis,
and travel agencies. The lack of regulations for RHPs provides them
with operational freedom, but it increases the regulatory burden
and economic dependency of their drivers.

Within the RHP ecosystem, the inequalities between multiple actors

results in unequal resources, agency, and levels of control. Despite their
technological innovations, RHPs are appear to be recreating traditional
inequalities within the digital economy. Despite the presence of such
inequalities, people continue to join the digital economy due to limited
options and means. Nonetheless, we hope that operators of digital plat-
forms may use these findings to fashion a more representative environ-
ment, and to bridge the gap between algorithmic governance and human
workers. Similarly, in setting policy directions, the government should
consider how reducing these inequalities should be balanced with effi-
ciency, accountability, and the interests of stakeholders and investors in the
platform economy.

Acknowledgements We thank the audiences and jury at the International

Conference on Digital Economy at IIM Raipur, 2019, where the initial version of
this chapter was presented. We are thankful to the Cities Programme organized by
the Centre for the Implementation of Public Policies Promoting Equity and
Growth (CIPPEC) for funding the project.
196 R. K. VERMA ET AL.

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 PART IV

Platform Politics
 CHAPTER 10

Aadhaar: Platform over Troubled Waters

Pawan Singh

The chapter offers a critical account of Aadhaar as an identity authentica-

tion platform and its evolving narrative in relation to its deployment by
banking, telecom and other private entities in India. The sources for this
chapter include the B.N. Srikrishna Committee Report on data protec-
tion, Personal Data Protection draft bill, statements made by various
members of the Parliament (MPs) in the Rajya Sabha during the passage
of the Aadhaar Amendment Bill 2019 and media reports. I will begin by
providing an overview of the Aadhaar privacy debate from 2012 to 2018,
paying attention to the petitions filed in support of Aadhaar’s use by the
private sector. I will subsequently examine the positions of pro-Aadhaar
groups, who which see Aadhaar data as a kind of “new oil” that can fuel
economic growth through digital innovation. These countervailing posi-
tions represent efforts to manage the crises of legibility and credibility in
order to rationalise the use of Aadhaar through the language of constitu-
tional values, social progress and nationalism. These debates allow us to
identify the key values that have emerged from the contestations around
data protection in India, and which may prove vital to salvaging the

P. Singh (*)
Australia India Institute, Carlton, VIC, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 201

A. Athique, V. Parthasarathi (eds.), Platform Capitalism in India,
Global Transformations in Media and Communication Research - A
Palgrave and IAMCR Series,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44563-8_10
202 P. SINGH

Aadhaar project, addressing other crises of confidence and ensuring the

protection of citizen data shared across public and private contexts of the
platform economy.
The 2009 launch of Aadhaar, the Indian government’s biometric iden-
tity project, ushered in a new regime of identification, especially for the
economically marginalised populations, who were previously understood
to be invisible, outside the legitimacy of a valid identity (UIDAI 2010).
The project was implemented as a voluntary scheme for the poor to enable
their access to welfare in a corruption-free, transparent manner directly
using their fingerprints and other biometric markers. Over a period of
time from 2012 onwards, Aadhaar became embroiled in legal challenges
pertaining to its potential for creating a surveillance state through possible
violations of the right to privacy, an affordance that was at the time yet to
be codified in the law as a fundamental right. The 2012 challenge by a
retired Karnataka judge filed in the Supreme Court of India led to two
landmark decisions: the first came in 2017, codifying privacy to be a fun-
damental right subject to certain limitations guaranteed by the Indian
Constitution, also called the Puttaswamy judgement (Supreme Court of
India 2017). The other followed in 2018 by the same court that upheld
the constitutional validity of Aadhaar as mandatory for access to welfare
schemes by the poor while exempting the non-welfare uses of Aadhaar
authentication (banking, mobile communications) except taxation from
mandatory submission (Supreme Court of India 2018). The non-welfare
uses, as discussed in subsequent sections, pertains to Aadhaar’s use as an
identity verification platform by private companies that sought to leverage
data collection under Aadhaar to grow their businesses.
The period between 2012 and 2018 is particularly instructive in con-
sidering Aadhaar as an identity authentication platform beleaguered by
legal and activist challenges on grounds of privacy and various other
adverse outcomes of welfare exclusion and fraud based on implementation
practices on the ground (Khera 2019). This chapter examines the nexus of
Aadhaar with ongoing questions around data privacy, identification and
data-driven economic growth that define the core of contestations around
Aadhaar’s status as a state-managed authentication platform and its orien-
tation towards use by India’s private sector. With a view to advance a criti-
cal discussion on India’s flourishing digital platform economy, this chapter
discusses how platform capitalism intersects with another key formation
shaped by data-driven commodification processes (Srnicek 2017) or what
others call surveillance capitalism (Zuboff 2019).
 10 AADHAAR: PLATFORM OVER TROUBLED WATERS 203

Aadhaar’s promise of unique identification and linkage to databases of

services led to public warnings by legal activists and experts around the
onset of a surveillance state, a prospect bolstered by the use of Aadhaar by
private corporations. The Indian Supreme Court’sS 2018 ruling on the
constitutional validity of Aadhaar legitimised its mandatory use by the
Indian state for welfare (Section 7 of the Aadhaar Act 2016) but also
struck down Section 57 of the Act, disallowing private players to use bio-
metric identification for their services. This was deemed to be a partial
victory by pro-privacy groups, who were concerned with Aadhaar’s non-­
welfare uses, which would effectively place Indian residents’ data in the
hands of private entities in order for the latter to monetise and profit from
it. Prior to the Aadhaar verdict, majority of banks and mobile phone com-
munication companies had already linked citizens Aadhaar numbers with
their services between 2013 and 2018 when Aadhaar’s mandatory use had
remained an unsettled question. Despite the Indian Supreme Court’s
2018 ruling preventing Aadhaar verification by banks and telecom compa-
nies, many continued the electronic-know your customer (e-KYC) using
Aadhaar in violation of the court’s order (Software Freedom Law Center
2018). In July 2019, the Aadhaar and Other Laws (Amendment Bill),
2019 was passed by the Lok Sabha (Lower House of the Indian Parliament)
to allow the voluntary use of Aadhaar by banks and telecom operators for
purposes of customer verification (Economic Times 2019). It was passed
in the Rajya Sabha (Upper House) on 8th July 2019. Of particular salience
was the amendment’s emphasis on addressing privacy and data security
concerns, given that India’s data protection laws remain under
development.
In that respect, it is important to account for the Indian private sector’s
vested interest in Aadhaar (literally, “foundation”) as a verification plat-
form underpinning the pursuit of India’s digital economy. Based on an
analysis of legal verdicts, activist documentation, media stories and data
protection policy frameworks, I will argue that the growth of India’s digi-
tal platform economy through the proposed voluntary use of Aadhaar
verification has necessitated the management of two kinds of interrelated
crises pertaining to legibility and credibility. The crisis of legibility con-
cerns the inevitable framing of digital platform capitalism as surveillance
capitalism given Aadhaar’s integration of user identification through a
centralised state-owned platform. Aadhaar faced a crisis of legibility as a
surveillance tool 2012 onwards leading up to the 2017 Puttaswamy judge-
ment declaring privacy to be a fundamental right guaranteed by the Indian
204 P. SINGH

Constitution, and the 2018 decision that upheld mandatory Aadhaar for
welfare but not for non-welfare, private sector uses. The crisis of legibility
surrounding Aadhaar became more acute given the absence of a data pro-
tection legislative framework, which gave way to an attendant crisis of
credibility—the key concern surrounding data privacy and user trust. The
management of these two crises required mitigation of the framing of
India’s growing digital platform economy as a surveillance capitalist enter-
prise by highlighting the potential of data-driven innovation in the deliv-
ery of services of the empowerment of Indian citizens.
To this end, policymakers, government officials, experts and industry
leaders mobilised an affective-regulatory apparatus of policy coupling the
urgent need for data protection with the nationalist framing of citizen data
as a national resource that can deliver user empowerment through the
growth of digital economy. Data in this formulation has been framed
inherently as an economic resource that can advance collective social good,
which takes priority over individual privacy. Various developments in the
Aadhaar privacy debate offer the broader context for situating the twin
crises of legibility and credibility facing the growth of India’s digital plat-
form businesses that seek to leverage Aadhaar for access to user data man-
aged by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI). These
developments include the 2017 Puttaswamy decision, the 2018 Supreme
Court judgement and importantly, the report and draft bill on data pro-
tection submitted by the expert committee headed by Justice
B.N. Srikrishna in 2018 (Committee of Experts 2018a). While the draft
Personal Data Protection Bill, 2018 lays out the various digital rights as
well as protocols regarding data storage, transfer and transmission, the
report recognised the need to protect individual data privacy but in the
context of the accompanying objective of facilitating the growth of India’s
digital economy (Committee of Experts 2018b). Similarly, media state-
ments by India’s leading industrialists have also likened data to a national
resource, a matter of sovereignty in economic terms. Pro-Aadhaar groups,
which include government officials, policymakers and the private sector,
have consistently maintained that data-­driven innovation through the dig-
ital economy can empower Indians through socioeconomic progress.
Clearly, Aadhaar as a verification platform offers a bridge across these dis-
parate services to facilitate the identification of potential customers based
on their data.
 10 AADHAAR: PLATFORM OVER TROUBLED WATERS 205

Aadhaar Legal Challenges 2012–2018: The Crisis

of Legibility

In 2012, Aadhaar was challenged by a retired judge from Karnataka,

Justice K.S. Puttaswamy, who filed a petition in the Indian Supreme Court
claiming that Aadhaar violated the constitutional right to privacy.
Meanwhile, as Aadhaar went from a voluntary scheme to a mandatory
one, for not just subsidised cooking gas cylinders but also banking and
mobile phone communications, various other challenges followed in the
highest court. These pertained to issues of exclusion of beneficiaries, man-
datory linkage, Aadhaar’s passage as a money bill and its linkage to the
Personal Account Number (PAN), which is an income tax identity card
(Chaturvedi 2017; Bhuyan 2018). In 2016, the Aadhaar (Targeted
Delivery of Financial and other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Act was
passed as a money bill in the Lok Sabha without debate in the Rajya Sabha
to provide legislative backing to Aadhaar. A money bill pertains to flows of
moneys into and out of the Consolidated Fund of India. In 2017, a nine-­
judge bench of the Indian Supreme Court declared privacy to be a funda-
mental right subject to exceptions of national security among others
(Supreme Court of India 2017). Then the 2018 judgement by a five-­
judge bench of the same court ruled mandatory Aadhaar legitimate for
welfare but overruled such a requirement for non-welfare purposes, or the
private sector.
Petitioners opposing the Aadhaar project had been vocal in media cov-
erage of the legal case, raising the spectre of the unique identification
scheme’s surveillance potential and data security flaws (Jyothish 2017;
Ramanathan 2017, 2018). As the government changed at the Centre in
2014, Modi, who had vehemently opposed the project when it was in the
Opposition, met with Nandan Nilekani once the former became the Prime
Minister and sought greater enrolment in Aadhaar (Dhoot and Rajshekhar
2014). When Aadhaar began its mandatory incursion into people’s lives
who, before the 2018 judgement, had been required to link it to their
mobile phone connections and bank accounts, the identification project’s
coercive aspects became a subject of public hardship inflicted by the
scheme originally meant to empower people. As a result, the dominant
story of Aadhaar was framed in media as a clash between the Indian gov-
ernment seeking to empower marginalised citizens through socioeco-
nomic rights and affordances and pro-privacy groups, including activists,
lawyers and advocates, who saw the danger of a national biometric
206 P. SINGH

identification project that would hollow out the Indian Constitution

(Firstpost 2018). This battle represented the main crisis of legibility for
Aadhaar, whose official position as a technology of social good came to be
overshadowed by its potential for citizen surveillance through biometric
id’s linkage to public programmes as well as private services. The 2018
Supreme Court ruling that Aadhaar’s mandatory use in welfare did not
violate citizen privacy in part moved towards a resolution of this crisis. The
ruling also struck down Section 57 of the Aadhaar Act 2016, which
allowed Aadhaar’s use by private companies to deliver their services. The
Court further observed the need for a data protection bill to be passed to
secure citizen data in India.
However, the more “subversive” aspects of the private interests attempt-
ing to cash in on a state-managed identification scheme received coverage
in niche media outlets. A 2018 story in the Huffington Post reported the
international technology business interests in integrating Aadhaar with
their product platforms. These included Microsoft (whose founder Bill
Gates publicly endorsed and praised Aadhaar), which uses Aadhaar in a
new version of Skype, Amazon, which also uses Aadhaar in some cases for
a quicker resolution to customer complaints of missing packages, and
Facebook, which has prompted users to log in with the same name as their
Aadhaar card, supposedly in order to build in an Aadhaar functionality
(Blumenthal and Sathe 2018). Such embedding of Aadhaar in communi-
cation, commercial and social connection services under the ruse of
authentication instantiates a logic that Adrian Athique terms the “inte-
grated commodity form”, which consolidates distinct media forms seeking
to deliver content, entertainment and sociability to the user, and as the
obverse, to deliver audiences to media corporations, who can monetise the
data flow (2019). The proposed use of Aadhaar by global communication
and media technology behemoths seeks to integrate biometric sign-in as a
credential validation technology in their platforms in order to minimise
the time taken to verify. Amazon’s digital wallet, Amazon Pay, has rolled
out the know-your-customer (KYC) using Aadhaar as one of the options,
which is cheaper and quicker than other documents such as passport, driv-
er’s licence or voter ID (Gill 2019).
While according to the Indian Supreme Court’s 2018 order, Aadhaar’s
use by private sector cannot be mandatory, its voluntary use as an alterna-
tive isn’t necessarily against the law. Aadhaar as a verification platform that
may connect diverse communication and commercial online services on a
voluntary basis illustrates how Aadhaar’s credential authentication serves
 10 AADHAAR: PLATFORM OVER TROUBLED WATERS 207

another key integrating function within the integrated commodity econ-

omy. Surveillance is not so much an end result or the banal scandal of
compromised user privacy; rather it is built into the interactive processes
through which communication technology companies stage the indisput-
able requirement to authenticate their subscriber. The need to “know
your customer” and validate their credentials combines a sound business
practice with the potential for access to data. Such an integration of bio-
metric identity with online credential sign-ins may not be pervasive in its
current iteration. However, with the passage of the Aadhaar and Other
Laws (Amendment) Bill 2019, the list of communication technology and
fintech enterprises wanting a piece of the Aadhaar pie is likely to grow.
Among the supporters and keen drivers of Aadhaar in the Supreme Court
was not just the Indian government. An entire coterie of private interests
offered their support to Aadhaar in a legal petition filed in the Indian
Supreme Court from 2017 onwards. Aria Thaker’s story “The New Oil:
Aadhaar’s Mixing of Public Risk and Private Profit”, published in the
2018 issue of the culture and politics magazine The Caravan, uncovers
the strategic intimacies among various private stakeholders who had served
in their official capacity in the design and architecture of Aadhaar and the
UIDAI, which manages Aadhaar.
Thaker highlights the role of one particular company, OnGrid, that
joined various others in the Supreme Court to argue in favour of Aadhaar’s
use to continue unchanged because their businesses had developed entirely
as a result of the biometric scheme (2018). OnGrid describes itself as the
“trust platform of India”, which uses a consent-based system for verifica-
tion and background checks of blue-collar employees such as handymen,
electricians, plumbers and others. It uses an India Stack application pro-
gramming interface (API) enabled by Aadhaar while also gathering infor-
mation about employees from numerous sources. OnGrid’s co-founder
Piyush Peshwani held a managerial position at UIDAI, which had
employed several executives of Khosla Labs—a business incubator and
investment firm that joined the petition supporting Aadhaar’s continued
use. Other co-petitioners supporting Aadhaar included the bicycle-sharing
company Yulu, the authentication services firm, Transaction Analysts and
the Digital Lenders Association of India, a group of financial start-ups.
Together, they formed the “Coalition for Aadhaar” and claimed in their
petition:
208 P. SINGH

There are several persons and businesses who depend on the Aadhaar system
in the same manner as the Applicants therein, and a society comprising many
such businesses who are dependent upon the Aadhaar system is being
formed. (Thaker 2018: 6)

Various companies such as Paytm, OlaCabs, Flipkart and PhonePe and

the user agencies licensed by the UIDAI also joined with petition with
contributions ranging from Rs. 10 lakhs ($14,464) up to Rs. 20 lakhs
($28,931). Thaker further reports her conversation with Rachita Taneja of
the Mozilla Foundation, who suggested that Aadhaar’s use by private
companies would enable user data collection without their consent or in
cases where a consent-model exists, it would be difficult to establish
whether consent was communicated meaningfully to the customer or sub-
scriber. The intricate network of associations among Khosla Labs, UIDAI
and other private actors playing a key role in the deployment of biometric
technology for a government programme suggests a “revolving door”—
the phenomenon of individuals using experience, knowledge and clout
gained in public service in pursuit of profit for private companies (ibid.:
12). Another group called iSPIRT—the Indian Software Products Industry
Round Table is a think-tank and an industry group for businesses that rely
on Aadhaar—developed India Stack, a set of APIs that facilitate the use of
Aadhaar by other platforms. While not a private firm, iSPIRT represents
private technology industry interests enlists volunteers for its work for a
compensation of $55,000. The volunteers, too, have held prominent posi-
tion in the UIDAI as chief system-architect and technology advisors, mar-
keting and demand generation professionals, chief product managers and
biometric architects. Thaker further cites a 2017 Privacy International
report on financial technology in India to explain the level of influence
exerted by private interests on Aadhaar who do not have to operate trans-
parently or be accountable in terms of the right to information legisla-
tion (2018).
Scholarly analyses of Aadhaar have been critically engaged with multi-
ple primary concerns of surveillance of subjects (Henne 2019; Khera
2019), identity and political subjecthood/citizenship (Shukla 2010; Rao
2013; Nair 2018; Cohen 2019), and issues of governance, datafication
and marketisation of rights (Chaudhari and König 2017; Rao and Nair
2019). Research on privacy concerns of Aadhaar have also offered valuable
 10 AADHAAR: PLATFORM OVER TROUBLED WATERS 209

ethnographic insights about data-privacy trade-off as well as perceptions

of technology’s credibility in terms of agents and means of information
collection (Srinivasan et al. 2018). The mandatory uses of Aadhaar have
been critiqued for undesirable outcomes of exclusion of legitimate benefi-
ciaries despite Aadhaar compliance, faulty design of biometric technology
and fading fingerprints, corruption owing to offline practices by the ration
dealer and legal arguments in the Supreme Court (Scroll 2018). The
scheme’s voluntary use through the proposed amendment passed earlier
this year by the Indian government remains to be understood with greater
attention to conflicts of interests, influence of the private sector on data
policies in India given their role in UIDAI, and whether Aadhaar can
legitimately serve the purpose of socioeconomic empowerment both via
its welfare delivery in the public and by streamlining of various services in
the private sector.
One reason for Aadhaar’s apprehension by the narrative of mass surveil-
lance is owing to the crisis of legibility despite there being evidence of the
scheme’s overall success (Banerjee 2016). The State of Aadhaar Report
2017–2018, based on a survey in rural parts of four states in India, also
reports general greater overall approval of Aadhaar by subscribers and
improvement in financial inclusion aside from areas that need urgent
attention (Government of India 2018). However, Aadhaar represents a
datafication of populations in developing societies (Taylor and Broeders
2015) and, materially, an audacious reconfiguration of residents’ identities
and rights in an unprecedented manner. Thus, the crisis of legibility it
faces marks a necessary stage in its status as an authentication technology
that seeks, not only to uniquely but succinctly know its subjects but also
to pervade their lives towards its foundational promise of socioeconomic
transformation. This crisis also prefigures and frames, in part, Aadhaar’s
perceived potential for driving the growth of platform capitalism in India.
While the deployment of Aadhaar in the private sector continues to be
contested, given the yet-to-be passed data protection bill, the imperative
of legibility has, in part, been sanctioned by the Indian Supreme Court’s
2018 verdict legitimising Aadhaar’s raison d’être for welfare. With the pas-
sage of the Aadhaar and Other Laws (Amendment) Bill 2019 in the Indian
Parliament, various pro-Aadhaar groups have been engaged in eliding the
obvious crisis of credibility that has emerged from mandatory biometrics
in the absence of a data protection law.
210 P. SINGH

The Aadhaar and Other Laws (Amendment) Bill

2019: The Crisis of Credibility
It is important to consider, then, how various stakeholders are engaged in
addressing the crisis of credibility. Much of the media and scholarly writ-
ings on Aadhaar have been concerned with the question of individual
identity and privacy in the context of an emergent data protection legisla-
tion. However, there is an equally urgent need for the institutions seeking
to administer that identity through Aadhaar as a platform to ensure their
own identities as service-providers inspires trust on an ongoing basis. The
evolution of Aadhaar debate concerning its use by the private sector faces
this dilemma or what I call a “crisis of credibility”. Given that the Supreme
Court of India struck down Section 57 of the Aadhaar Act 2016, effec-
tively preventing the use of Aadhaar by hopeful private actors whose busi-
ness potential resided in leveraging Aadhaar’s authentication platform, the
urgent task at hand for them is to manage and avert this crisis from
escalating.
Ashish Bhardwaj and Anand Mishra from the School of Banking and
Finance at Jindal Global Law University point out the concerns of India’s
fintech sector arising from the Supreme Court’s ruling, mainly pertaining
to the time and cost of establishing user identity (2019). They suggest
that while establishing customer identity is central to their business, their
users should also have trust in the digital identity system. Another aspect
of the crisis of credibility concerns a kind of image problem for Aadhaar,
or a clear understanding of what Aadhaar means to different stakeholders
and demographics. For the poor, it is an identity verification mechanism,
which sometimes functions against their interests by excluding them.
Their struggles with Aadhaar have been brought to public attention by
development economist Reetika Khera, who describes Aadhaar as a solu-
tion looking for a problem, and legal scholar Usha Ramanathan, who calls
it a marketing scheme by Nandan Nilekani, who has pitched Aadhaar to
various constituency as a solution to their diverse problems (Ramnath and
Assisi 2018). As journalists N.S. Ramnath and Charles Assisi point out,
Aadhaar is not a solution to any problem by itself, which it is often taken
to be (2018). Rather, Aadhaar, which was built as a platform to allow for
innovations from above and below, is a Lego block, “one piece in a larger
system, not a solution by itself, but something that can accelerate a solu-
tion” (ibid.: 86). The Lego block metaphor suggests that Aadhaar as a
platform is not intended as a solution to India’s complex social problems
 10 AADHAAR: PLATFORM OVER TROUBLED WATERS 211

but as a mechanism to improve the government’s capacity to build solu-

tions and implement them on the ground. Despite this immanent view of
Aadhaar as just a block in a larger system, its pervasive uptake and trans-
formational effect in public and private service delivery have shaped the
crisis of trust that has arisen in the absence of a data protection law in India.
Aadhaar’s second life post the Supreme Court’s judgement began with
the Aadhaar and Other Laws (Amendment) Bill 2019 passed by the Indian
Parliament in July 2019 through the amendment of the Telegraph Act
1885 and the Prevention of Money Laundering Act 2002. The Bill pro-
vides the voluntary use for Aadhaar by banks and mobile communication
provides to authenticate user credentials. In the Rajya Sabha, Ravi Shankar
Prasad, Indian Minister for Electronics and Information Technology
(MeiTY), stated that informed consent of the customer was necessary for
authentication while further observing that the system with its 256-bit
encryption for bank transactions and 2048-bit encryption for Aadhaar
data (virtually unbreakable in the minster’s view) is absolutely sound and
secure (Rajya Sabha TV 2019). During the Rajya Sabha proceedings, MPs
from the Congress and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) objected on grounds of
data protection concerns and possibilities of Aadhaar data leakage. Another
MP of the Indian National Congress (INC) from West Bengal opposed
the Aadhaar Amendment Bill by defining what Aadhaar is not or ought
not be: a singular identity for one nation, mandatory or exclusive, certifi-
cation of identity’s truth, a tool of exclusion or data collection, a tool of
surveillance and for use by private agencies. Further observing that it is
only meant for government services, subsidies, benefits and welfare, he
questioned why a data protection act was not passed before Aadhaar was
implemented. However, these objections were countered with the reitera-
tion of the voluntary nature of the amendment and quality of encryption
that secures data and the emphasis on injunction by law against storage of
Aadhaar data by telecommunication providers. A violation of this injunc-
tion would incur a fine of Rs. 1 crore ($144,370.00).
Further objections were raised on how the amendment bill would fur-
ther go against the spirit of the Indian Supreme Court judgement of 2018
that dispensed with such use of Aadhaar by the private sector. Statements
made by other MPs in the Parliament including Prashant Nanda of the
Biju Janata Dal (Orissa) extolled the virtues of Aadhaar for improving the
welfare of farmers in the country and seconded the claim made by Ravi
Shankar Prasad that about 1.23 billion Indians approved of Aadhaar.
Ashwini Vaishnaw, an MP of the ruling BJP, cited various statistics
212 P. SINGH

pertaining to correction of identity records—4.23 billion connections of

liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), 2.98 billion ration cards—owing to
Aadhaar’s implementation to clean out corrupt practices of fraudulent
identity documents. He further quoted the triple constitutional test laid
down regarding Aadhaar’s use by the Indian Supreme Court and taken up
in the Justice Srikrishna Committee’s recommendations on data protec-
tion in its report: (1) Aadhaar should be backed by law, (2) a legitimate
state interest in implementing Aadhaar for a scheme and (3) proportional-
ity or the steps taken by state to implement Aadhaar ought to be propor-
tional to the purpose of such implementation. Asserting that Aadhaar is
purpose-blind, that is, it only authenticates a person as a yes/no response
and does not collect, share, store or transmit data about the purpose of
authentication, the MP remained emphatic about the security of data
under Aadhaar. The data security standards described by Vaishnaw sound
more reasonable than previous defences of Aadhaar’s data security by the
former Attorney General of India in the Supreme Court during Aadhaar
hearings, with the claim that Aadhaar was secured in a complex with
13-feet-high and 5-feet-­thick walls (Jain 2018).
While most defences of the amendment bill underscored the benefits to
the poor, approval by majority of Indian citizens and its design features of
encryption, its use by private sector in violation of the Supreme Court
judgement was only addressed by members opposing the bill. Aadhaar has
also suffered a number of data breaches brought public’s attention by
journalists, think-tanks and other advocates. Rachna Khaira of the Tribune
newspaper reported in January 2018 that access to Aadhaar data through
a login and password could be purchased for Rs. 500 ($7), which could
provide Aadhaar details of a billion subscribers, including name, phone
numbers, addresses and email. For another Rs. 300 ($4.31), the report
goes on, software could be purchased to print the Aadhaar card of a sub-
scriber (Khaira 2018). These services were purchased from an anonymous
source from the popular messaging service WhatsApp. The UIDAI rub-
bished the exposé, asserting that the biometric data was not breached, and
initiated police action against the journalist. Similarly, in 2017, the think-­
tank Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) reported the publishing of
Aadhaar details on four government websites, an investigation that was
again dismissed by the UIDAI, which asked CIS for an explanation
(Livemint 2017). The most problematic misuse of Aadhaar was by the
mobile communication operator Airtel, which used Aadhaar numbers of
its mobile subscribers to reroute their LPG subsidy benefits from their
 10 AADHAAR: PLATFORM OVER TROUBLED WATERS 213

personal bank accounts into bank accounts opened by Airtel without the
subscribers’ consent. The telecom operator was fined Rs. 2.5 crores
($360,166) and its e-KYC licence was suspended.
Despite these data breaches, the UIDAI has maintained that its biomet-
ric database is secure and has never been breached, a claim that is true
given that biometric data contained in the Central Identities Data
Repository (CIDR), which manages and stores data collected during
Aadhaar enrolment, has not been reported to be breached. These data
breaches do represent a real crisis of credibility for Aadhaar and the
UIDAI, however, a fundamental lack of clarity about what specific data is
private and cannot be leaked and what data may be ambiguously public or
private (such as Aadhaar number and demographic details) has remained
largely unclear (Legally India 2017). Insofar as the biometric data, the
most sensitive information, remains secure and unhackable, Aadhaar and
the UIDAI’s credibility would withstand scrutiny.

A Free and Fair Digital Economy

As I have previously noted, the most prominent piece of the credibility
puzzle for Aadhaar is India’s data protection bill, which has been under
consultation with the Justice B.N. Srikrishna Committee, a group of legal
and technology experts appointed by the government in 2017 to formu-
late India’s data protection legislation. The Justice Srikrishna Committee
released its report on India’s data protection bill in October 2018. The
report entitled, “A Free and Fair Digital Economy: Protecting Privacy,
Empowering Indians” lays out the framework for personal data protec-
tions rules in India and contextualises them within the broader constitu-
tional framework of India that upholds common good and social progress
as goals the state must pursue (Committee of Experts 2018a, b). The
report also recognises the right to privacy laid down in the Puttaswamy
judgement while tying the need for data protection to the unlocking of
the limitless potential of the digital economy. Couching its objectives in
constitutional terms, the report suggests that there is no conflict between
the individual right to privacy and data protection and the social interest
served by the digital economy. Instead, they both “serve a common con-
stitutional objective” pertaining to the “protection of individual auton-
omy and consequent harm prevention” and the creation of real choice for
citizens (p. 8). By wedding the larger objective of common, public good
(as also identified by the Supreme Court of India in its 2018 judgement
214 P. SINGH

on Aadhaar) to the language of rights—privacy, individual autonomy, self-­

determination—the report positions rights not as individual affordances
but as being constitutive of the common good of a free and fair digital
economy.
The proposed compatibility among data protection, rights and digital
economy in the report prioritises the importance of serving public good
through data that may be harnessed as a national resource simultaneous
with protecting its security, confidentiality and integrity across data sys-
tems. While India’s Personal Data Protection Bill is yet to become law as
of 2019, the momentum towards data protection is being reframed in part
through the language of colonisation and nationalism. In January 2019,
Reliance Industries chief, Mukesh Ambani urged Prime Minister Narendra
Modi to act against the use of Indian citizen’s data by global corporations
at the Vibrant Gujarat Summit. Likening such use as a form of data colo-
nisation, Ambani invoked Gandhi’s struggle against political colonisation
to make the case for Indian citizens’ data to be owned and used by Indians
to advance their digital economy (Langa 2019). At the G20 Summit in
Japan in 2019, Piyush Goyal, India’s Commerce and Industry Minister,
spoke of data sovereignty, the idea that India has a sovereign right to the
data generated by Indians, which should be used for the welfare and devel-
opment of their people. Opposing the Japanese Premiere Shinzo Abe’s
proposal of Data Free Flow with Trust (DFFT), which enables cross-­
border transfer of information by electronic means and its storage on for-
eign servers, Goyal referred to India’s e-commerce policy that favours data
localisation and locating computational facilities within India to ensure
job creation. The principle of data sovereignty takes data to be a national
resource, a form of societal commons or national asset that the govern-
ment holds in trust (Agrawal 2019).
In the light of the Aadhaar and Other Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2019
passed by the Indian Parliament, the developments around a data protec-
tion legislation have emerged through the merging of the rights vocabu-
lary with the state’s developmentalist agenda. This agenda seeks to harness
personal data as a national resource through the language of sovereignty
that resists data colonisation by global corporations. These positions also
represent attempts to mitigate the crisis of credibility surrounding Aadhaar.
Aadhaar’s voluntary use by banks, telecommunication operators and pos-
sibly other private companies goes against the letter of the law, as high-
lighted by India’s Opposition parties in the Parliament. Through a
subsumption of the contra-narratives of surveillance, data misuse and
 10 AADHAAR: PLATFORM OVER TROUBLED WATERS 215

inadequate data protection legislation within larger nationalist registers of

collective, common good and citizen empowerment through real choices
in a free and fair digital economy, the use of Aadhaar as an authentication
platform is likely to accelerate. However, India’s pro-privacy groups
including think-tanks, advocates, lawyers and activists are also just as likely
to keep re-animating the crisis of credibility surrounding Aadhaar. In
August 2019, Trinamool Congress MP Mahua Moitra alleged in the Lok
Sabha that there was a conflict of interest in the drafting of the data pro-
tection law given the possibility that lawyers working on the bill may have
private clients in the field of technology. She demanded the MeITY to
make public the name of the lawyers and firms empanelled with the gov-
ernment, especially those drafting the data protection bill (Saha 2019).
The delay in bringing the data protection bill to the Parliament in her view
was due to vested interests working in the government to ensure the pas-
sage of amendments to the Aadhaar Act 2016 allowing for Aadhaar’s
extensive use by the private sector.
While the Government of India continues to claim that it recognises
the urgent need for a robust data protection legislation, it has not addressed
the concerns of pro-privacy groups, who see Aadhaar’s use by the private
sector—despite its voluntary nature and punitive provisions for data
breaches—as leading to potential monetisation of user data without proper
privacy and consent frameworks in place. Aadhaar as a platform will con-
tinue to evolve serving public interests of welfare delivery as well as busi-
ness interests of a robust digital economy. The data protection bill, when
it is passed, will certainly further legitimise Aadhaar’s uptake, however, the
UIDAI will need to ensure new values concerning information/data secu-
rity in the data protection bill when it is tabled in the Parliament. Broadly,
at the institutional level, it will need to ensure integrity of information
through processes of data collection, storage, sharing, transfer and trans-
mission. At the individual level, information autonomy in terms of con-
sent, right to access and correction of data, erasure of data as well as a right
to be forgotten provides the necessary bulwark against privacy harms. The
draft data protection bill does lay out a framework to accommodate these
new values emerging from the experience of Aadhaar’s implementation in
India. However, for these new formulations that encompass the scope of
data protection in India to have relevance to the predicament of India’s
information society, ethnographic and qualitative research on privacy, con-
sent, autonomy and data-sharing practices from a social and cultural per-
spective needs to inform policymaking.FundingThe research for this
216 P. SINGH

chapter was supported by a grant from the Toyota Foundation’s “Exploring

New Values for Society” scheme and the “Digital Identity Research
Initiative” fellowship programme of the Indian School of Business,
Hyderabad.

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 CHAPTER 11

Political Communication on Social Media

Platforms

Usha Rodrigues

Prime Minister Narendra Modi claimed a landslide victory in the 2019

national election, with his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) winning 303 seats,
comfortably beyond the 272-seat required for a majority in the Indian
Lok Sabha (lower house of parliament). As has been the recent trend, the
2019 Indian election campaign was fought on social media apps and plat-
forms. After the 2014 national election was named the ‘first social media
election’ in India, it was predicted that WhatsApp, a messaging app owned
by Facebook, would play a significant role in the 2019 election campaign
(Rodrigues 2018). During the state elections in 2018–2019, WhatsApp
was increasingly being used by BJP and various opposition parties to keep
in touch with their constituents. In fact, a number of political parties set
up data analytics departments to analyse voter data at district and booth
levels to tailor their election campaigns, and almost all regional and
national leaders were using FacebookLive to connect with voters. Although

U. Rodrigues (*)
Deakin University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 221

A. Athique, V. Parthasarathi (eds.), Platform Capitalism in India,
Global Transformations in Media and Communication Research - A
Palgrave and IAMCR Series,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44563-8_11
222 U. RODRIGUES

traditional factors such as caste- and religion-based candidate selection

and voting patterns, and more contemporary issues of unemployment and
farmers’ unrest were significant issues in the 2019 election campaign, it
was the use of social media platforms as a communication tool for political
campaigning that gained further ground for parties in India.
Considering the context of an increasingly platform-driven society,
where private and public communication is largely channelled through a
global online platform (social and mobile) ecosystem, I discuss in this
chapter how social media and mobile platforms are utilised for political
communication in India and the implications for India’s public sphere. I
will begin by outlining how Modi and his government use social media as
a means of direct communication with their followers, and the technologi-
cal structural shift in the country that has enabled this online conversation
between various private and public networks. The chapter will end with an
analysis of the positive and negative impact of the direct communication
of political messages on social media platforms in a country such as India,
where the level of media and digital literacy varies dramatically.

Campaigning on Social Media Platforms

In the past decade, various social media and mobile platforms have been
part of economic, interpersonal and political communication in India. It
was in 2011, during the so-called Arab Spring period, that scholars and
the mainstream media noted the use of social media for mass communica-
tion and mobilisation in India. The social and political movement against
sitting governments in the Arab countries of Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya
and Syria in 2011, were also reflected in India when a series of mass civil
demonstrations were organised against corruption by those in power. The
organisers of the ‘India against Corruption’ movement, under the leader-
ship of Anna Hazare and Arvind Kejriwal, planned nation-wide protests
and dharnas (sit-ins) in early 2011. ‘Team Anna’ demanded that the
Indian central government consult with members of ‘civil society’ to draft
a strong Lokpal (ombudsman) bill to increase accountability of those in
public office. The mass protests that followed were organised by the youth,
educated, professional and working class in India, who used mobile phones
and social networking sites to garner support across the full spectrum of
Indian society. In an inter-media agenda-setting process, the movement
was cheered by the country’s hundreds of 24-hour news channels and
thousands of newspapers (Rodrigues 2014; Ashutosh 2012). The
 11 POLITICAL COMMUNICATION ON SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS 223

mainstream media responded to this so-called middle-class movement

because it also represented their target audiences in the electorate
(Rodrigues 2014).
Following the mass civil unrest, some in the anti-corruption movement
formed a new political entity called the Aam Adami Party (AAP) to contest
the idea of public probity on the political front. In 2012–2013, AAP
leader Arvind Kejriwal and his party were active on social media sites such
as Twitter and YouTube, and subsequently formed local government in
the capital city of Delhi. However, it was the BJP and its prime ministerial
candidate Narendra Modi, who best utilised social media platforms to
engage with the educated, networked, middle-class Indians, including
150 million first-time voters. Although both the BJP and the Indian
National Congress (INC or Congress) party extensively used YouTube as
their own television channels during the 2014 national election campaign,
the Congress party could not compete with the BJP’s three-dimensional
hologram rallies, gamification of political messages, the prime ministerial
candidate’s focused messages on Twitter and his Google Hangouts. The
head of the BJP’s information technology cell in 2014, Arvind Gupta,
noted that ‘with technology and social media, we have been able to create
an alternative medium with which we can directly communicate with the
citizens’ (Goyal 2014).
In 2014, as the prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi had about
4 million followers for his Twitter handle @narendramodi, whereas his
rival, INC president Rahul Gandhi, only had about 55,000 followers of his
@rahulgandhi2020 account. As many as 56 million election-related tweets
were posted during the five months of the election campaign in early 2014
(Merelli and Quartz 2014). However, an analysis of the Twitter feed
showed that the Twitter conversations were concentrated amongst the
elite and men, including politicians, journalists, academics, prominent
social activists and professionals (Rodrigues 2015). In 2014, India had
about 200 million internet users, with about 100 million users active on
social media networking sites. Despite the digital divide, the mainstream
media’s dedicated coverage of social media conversations made the role of
social media platforms one of the talking points of the election. In an
inter-media agenda-setting process, the mainstream media amplified
Modi’s messages to mainstream media consumers (McCombs 2005;
Messner and Garrison 2011). Considering the impact and potential of
social media platforms to engage and organise the younger and educated
middle class in India, who are also the target of many advertisers, it is not
224 U. RODRIGUES

surprising that mainstream Indian news media and journalists tapped into
this rich tapestry to get a sense of what mattered to this audience. In the
absence of a meaningful interaction with the new prime minister, the
mainstream media was left scrambling, covering his articulations on
social media.
The successful use of social media platforms by Modi and BJP in the
2014 election, compelled opposition parties, both at the national and
regional, level to jump on the bandwagon. During the 2019 elections, a
number of party leaders and their teams used FacebookLive, WhatsApp,
TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and NaMo App to connect with
their supporters. Twitter said that 396 million tweets related to the elec-
tion were sent during the campaign period (Vinayak 2019). Prime Minister
Modi and the BJP had made further social media inroads since their 2014
victory, using the ‘inexpensive medium’ to stay in touch with their base
(Amit Malviya, personal communication 2018). BJP information technol-
ogy cell chief Amit Malviya said his party had a clear view of the efficacy of
social media as a tool for political communication. Since the 2018 state
elections, INC social media head Divya Spandana and her team also gained
ground on the BJP’s social media strategies. Political parties sought to
gather supporters’ phone numbers, to give them a call on a mobile, which
in turn allowed them to add the number to their database and to their
local WhatsApp group. They treat these phone numbers and demographic
details as important data, building a social relationship by keeping in touch
with supporters during non-election periods. Experienced political jour-
nalists note that there is a two-tier communication system on social media
(personal communication, 2018). Political leaders use their own personal
handle to promote their policies and positive messages, while their online
supporters disseminate divisive views of their party and troll those who do
not agree. The parties also set up data analytics departments to analyse and
target local election campaigns.

Structural Shift and the Public Sphere

Over the past two decades, India has experienced a dramatic increase in
mobile-phone subscriptions. The first mobile telephone service was
launched in 1995 and since then the tele-density in India had surpassed 91
per cent of the country’s population of 1.35 billion in 2018 (TRAI 2019).
The change in telecommunication policy from being restricted to monop-
olistic government corporations till the mid-1990s to private competition
 11 POLITICAL COMMUNICATION ON SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS 225

saw the mobile-phone subscription cross the one billion mark in 2018.
Access to the internet has improved with the entry of private and interna-
tional telecom service providers using 4G technology, with the average
cost of data falling from $3 per gigabyte to $0.20 per gigabyte in the four
years between 2014 and 2018 (Tanwar 2019). As a result, annual data
usage per subscriber increased to 7.6 gigabyte in 2018, according a TRAI
report. In addition, in 2019, the number of people accessing internet is
expected to be around 627 million, with 87 per cent of users accessing the
internet on their mobile phones, according to Kantar, an advertisement
agency report (Exchange4media 2019). According to one estimate, India
had about 468 million smartphone users in 2017, which was expected to
double by 2022 (Shenoy 2019). Social media and mobile platforms thus
offer politicians an inexpensive medium to communicate with their con-
stituents, while the young, educated and networked citizens have become
the conduit of political communication in their respective local networks.
Social media is any digital medium that enables users to communicate
and interact socially. Users of social media utilise various internet and elec-
tronic services and tools to actively participate in sharing information
through comments, posts, reviews and discussion via text, graphic, audio,
video and animated content. ‘Social media can be defined as digital multi-
way channels of communication among people and between people and
information resources, and which are personalised, scalable, rapid and
convenient’ (Katz et al. 2013: 12). This definition of a social media plat-
form includes popular social sites, such as Facebook, YouTube and
Instagram, and messaging apps, such as Twitter, WeChat and WhatsApp.
One of the basic functions of a social media platform is that it allows
many-to-many communication instantly. Meanwhile, the process of plat-
formisation happens when platforms extend into the web and pull web
data back into their platforms, as is the case with Facebook, Google and
Apple. Helmond uses the term platformisation to refer ‘to the rise of the
platform as the dominant infrastructural and economic model of the social
web and the consequences of the expansion of social media platforms into
other spaces online’ (2015: 5). As an infrastructural model, social media
platforms provide a technological framework to build on, geared towards
connecting to and using other websites, apps and their data. At the same
time, the external data is tailored for their own databases (Helmond 2015:
8). Helmond says that the dual process is operationalised through
platform-­native objects such as application programming interfaces (APIs)
and social plug-ins, allowing for the social platforms to expand into the
226 U. RODRIGUES

web and to create data channels for collecting and formatting external web
data to fit the underlying logic of its own platform.
Twitter, as an online news and social networking platform, has gained
significance in political communication as a microblogging platform that
allows users to post and read short multimedia messages known as tweets.
Facebook is one of the most popular social networking platforms, with
2.41 billion monthly active users as of 30 June 2019 (Statista.com 2019a,
b). YouTube, the biggest online video platform worldwide, has 2 billion
monthly active users. More than 5 billion videos have been shared to date,
and nearly 1 billion hours of videos are watched daily (YouTube.com
2019). Short messaging apps, such as WhatsApp, have become increas-
ingly popular as an easy-to-use mobile-phone service. WhatsApp allows
users to share data (text, audio, video) with individuals and groups. With
more than 1.5 billion monthly active users, WhatsApp is the most popular
mobile messenger app worldwide. Recently, WhatsApp confirmed that it
had more than 400 million users in India (Singh 2019).WhatsApp mes-
sages are encrypted, so it is difficult to detect where a forwarded message
originates from. This means that media messages can be shared between
social groups without the knowledge of who first distributed the message
on the service. Friends, family and acquaintances can form a group on
WhatsApp and share content of interest.
One billion groups are in use on WhatsApp. Some have been formed
for e-commerce reasons, while others are made up of family members or
friends. Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, has noted that private messag-
ing, ephemeral stories and conversations between small groups are the
fastest growing areas of online communication (Kalogeropoulos 2019).
Reuters Digital News Report 2019 also noted that in many countries peo-
ple were spending less time with Facebook and more time with WhatsApp
and Instagram in 2019 than in 2018 (Newman et al. 2019). This, in turn,
is having an impact on social communication around news, which is
becoming more private, as messaging apps continue to grow everywhere.
‘WhatsApp has become a primary network for discussing and sharing news
in non-Western countries’ such as Brazil, Malaysia, South Africa and India
(Newman 2019). Concerns about misinformation and disinformation
remain high; trust in the news in general is declining (42 per cent) and
trust in social media remains low at 23 per cent according to the Reuters
report (Newman et al. 2019).
 11 POLITICAL COMMUNICATION ON SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS 227

Modi Leads the Way

Modi is the key politician leading the structural shift to direct communica-
tion by developing his base of followers on social media and mobile plat-
forms. Modi’s presence on social media began in 2012. He is, in terms of
his online following on global social media platforms, the second-most
‘popular’ politician in the world. He maintains an active presence across
multiple platforms, including Twitter with 51 million followers, Facebook
with 44 million likes and followers, Instagram with 30 million followers
and YouTube with 433 million views of videos as on October 2019, and
more than 10 million downloads of his NaMo App (as of March 2019).
Modi’s messages are relayed in multiple languages to connect with his
range of followers across poly-linguistic India and to reach audiences
abroad. For example, when Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu,
visited India, his meeting with Modi was reported on the latter’s social
media pages in English and Hebrew, with a number of staged visuals dem-
onstrating the close relationship between the two countries and prime
ministers.
Modi and his social media team have carefully crafted his online image
through strategic engagement with his followers, influencers, celebrities,
overseas dignitaries, movie and sports stars, and successful business peo-
ple, and, at times, by engaging with and congratulating common people
for their efforts to support his agenda, including as the ‘Clean India’ cam-
paign. Modi launched Clean Indian on Twitter just after coming to office
as the prime minister in late 2014. In 2015–2016, he posted 100 tweets
related to the Clean India agenda, but he did not retweet or reply to any
tweets in this time (Rodrigues and Niemann 2017). Similarly, during the
three-month period following the announcement of demonetisation,
Modi’s Twitter account incessantly emphasised the benefits of the ban of
85 per cent of Indian currency notes. His team kept moving the Twitter
conversation along during this historical event by changing the hashtag
from #Indiafightscorruption to #Indiadefeatsblackmoney to #ipaydigitally
(Rodrigues and Niemann 2019). During the 2019 elections, Modi and his
BJP made clever use of the term ‘Chowkidar’ to keep the focus on nation-
alism, patriotism and his role as the protector of the nation. His articula-
tions on various platforms were supported by the @PMO_India account;
his cabinet ministers and government departments Twitter handles.
Studies of Modi’s use of Twitter to communicate with his followers
over the past five years show that his communication is a one-way process.
228 U. RODRIGUES

In what is described as ‘selfie nationalism’ (Rao 2018), Modi keeps his

followers aware of his day-to-day activities using various social media plat-
forms, including his NaMo App, and of his views, in his radio programmes
such as Maan Ki Baat (what is in my heart) on the public service broad-
caster. Modi’s messages are almost always positive, promoting a ‘digital
India’ agenda and various ‘pradhanmantri’ (prime ministerial) funding
schemes. While minimising his interaction with the mainstream media,
which he has branded as ‘news traders’ (ANI 2014), he uses celebrities
and influencers to get his message across on various social media plat-
forms. His reservations about mainstream news media stem from his years
as the chief minister of Gujarat, when several national media outlets and
their journalists held Modi responsible for the 2002 religious riots in
Gujarat, in which hundreds of people were killed. Modi and his social
media team have built his political agenda (Cobb et al. 1976) by directly
conversing with the electorate. Modi’s use of alternative means for com-
municating with the electorate has reduced the mainstream media’s power
to question him as prime minister, with the political discourse in the coun-
try being guided by ‘political logic’ rather than by ‘media logic’ (Stromback
and Esser 2014: 245). Social media, mobile technologies and the internet
have offered an alternative avenue to political leaders to gain attention to
their causes and directly connect with the masses, bypassing the main-
stream media. In what Chadwick (2013) refers to as a hybrid media system,
the new media ecology has changed the relative power of actors in political
and media systems, as well as the nature of political communication itself.

Political Engagement and Social

Media Gratification
A number of studies have formulated a typology for gratifications that
audiences seek and receive from being active on social media (Smock et al.
2011; Chen 2011; Hanson and Haridakis 2008; Lee and Ma 2012;
Valeriani and Vaccari 2018). Chen’s study of Twitter users found that
people gratify their need to connect with other people, forming an infor-
mal camaraderie to stratify their need to belong to or to be affiliated with
a community (2011: 760). Hanson and Haridakis, in their study of on-­
demand video-sharing site YouTube, found viewers were active partici-
pants in the distribution chain, playing an active role in the production,
distribution and receipt of YouTube media content (2008). News
 11 POLITICAL COMMUNICATION ON SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS 229

consumers used YouTube to gain information, to enjoy light-hearted

entertainment and to express themselves in the marketplace of informa-
tion (Hanson and Haridakis 2008: 5). Smock et al. surveyed students to
ascertain their motivation for using Facebook and found three motivations
significantly predicted general use of Facebook: relaxing entertainment,
expressive information sharing and social interaction (2011). Users had
varied needs for using specific Facebook features, such as posts, private
messages and the chat service, including seeking companionship, profes-
sional advancement, habitual pastime and escapism (Smock et al. 2011:
2326). Lee and Ma’s study of factors influencing users’ intention to share
news on social media, showed that ‘while newer users make active media
selections based on gratifications, more experienced social media users
may rely on habitual and ritualized modes of content sharing behaviour’
(Lee and Ma 2012: 337). In their study, prior social media experience
emerged as a significant predictor for intention to share news, while social-
isation, status seeking and a desire to improve one’s credibility were other
gratifications motivating users to share news.
The gratification of being part of a group of like-minded people, being
close to a political party and its leaders, a sense of connectedness with
those in power and sharing and expressing views about everything that is
politics, enhanced individual’s status in their networks, who felt that they
knew the ‘truth’ or the real story. In India, WhatsApp activism has become
the order of the day (Harris 2019). Even before the 2019 election period,
the sharing of fake news, rumours and misleading information had been
linked to 46 deaths and several injuries, prompting WhatsApp to modify
its policies on forwarding message in India (Gilbert and Saberin 2018). In
fact, just before the election, an apparent BBC news story was circulated
among WhatsApp groups predicting that the ruling BJP party would lose
the election to the INC alliance. The story was attributed to the ‘American
spy agency CIA’, ‘British spy agency KGB’ and ‘Israeli spy agency
MOSAD’. The story was, of course, ‘fake news’ and nowhere to be found
on the BBC News network. During the 2019 election period, it was not
only the various political parties and their candidates pushing their mes-
sages to thousands of local WhatsApp groups, but many of the loyalists
became a conduit, spreading their party’s message among friends and fam-
ily. Political parties—the BJP, INC and various regional parties—not only
pushed political propaganda material through social media platforms but
also negative and misleading posts. The war rooms monitored and trolled
230 U. RODRIGUES

those who opposed a political party and spread rumours, lies and fake
news on WhatsApp (Harris 2019).
This misinformation and disinformation in byte-size packages, with
crude posts, videos and memes, went viral because of the ease with which
they could be shared. The reason information of obviously questionable
veracity was being shared without regard for the truth was that it rein-
forced the beliefs sharers had about the opposition. Valenzuela et al. in
their study of sharing misinformation on social media, found that, para-
doxically, using social media for news could indirectly lead to the spread of
misinformation because of its association with individuals’ political partici-
pation or zeal:

Using a platform for informational purposes, such as Twitter or Facebook

allow, can motivate users to become more politically engaged. Increased
political engagement is correlated with increased spread of content, includ-
ing misinformation. (Valenzuela 2019: 14)

In the Indian case, there could be several reasons for the rapid spread of
fake news, misinformation and disinformation on social media, including
the perceived novelty of participants’ capacity to share and forward infor-
mation on their mobile phones, and a partisan urge to reinforce beliefs
about the opposition. One journalist notes that his investigation of 20
WhatsApp groups revealed widespread slander, abuse and conspiracy
claims directed at the Gandhi family (Purohit 2019). A cynical tendency
to believe conspiracy theories amongst the population becomes amplified
when it receives a slight nudge from political leaders via their official
accounts. For example, on 6 May 2019, one day after Narendra Modi said
that Rajiv Gandhi had died as ‘bhrashtachari number 1 (corrupt number
1)’, a floodgate of conspiracy theories opened on social media platforms.
It initially began with messages reiterating Modi’s allegations. Then,
swiftly, a more organised flood of media unleashed itself on various
WhatsApp groups, including a six-minute long video that detailed how
Gandhi allegedly was of Muslim lineage, rooted in Afghanistan, and that
his ‘real’ name was ‘Rajiv Khan’ (Purohit 2019).

Applying Brakes on the Runaway Train

In March 2019, the Election Commission of India (ECI), an autonomous
constitutional authority responsible for election administration in India,
demanded that multinational technology companies, such as Facebook,
 11 POLITICAL COMMUNICATION ON SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS 231

Twitter, Google, TikTok and Indian social messaging site ShareChat,

ensure the integrity of the election process during the 2019 elections. The
social media companies agreed and signed a voluntary code of ethics,
effective 20 March until the end of the election period, 23 May (ECI
2019). The agreed code included a direct line between the ECI and the
social media platforms to notify and swiftly rectify any potential violations
of the Indian electoral laws. Under the agreed code, social media compa-
nies also undertook to monitor and label paid political messages broadcast
on their platforms in addition to removing any images or reference to the
Indian armed forces by political campaigners. The companies also volun-
teered to facilitate access to information regarding electoral matters,
undertake education campaigns to build awareness of electoral laws and
endeavour to conduct platform-specific training for ECI nodal officers
(ECI 2019). At ECI’s request, Facebook and Twitter took down political
posters that featured an Indian Air Force pilot’s photographs. Social media
firms confirmed that they had taken down the accounts of thousands of
people allegedly associated with political accounts. Google organised
town-hall meetings to improve users’, including students, journalists and
the general public, digital literacy. Facebook and WhatsApp representa-
tives confirmed that they had engaged several fact-checking partners,
including Boom Live, AFP India, India Today, Dainik Jagran, Face
Crescendo, Factly and NewsMobile, to identify false and misleading infor-
mation on their platforms (Rodrigues 2019).
A Microsoft study found that Indian citizens were more likely to see
fake news and internet hoaxes on social network platforms than the global
average of internet users, as well as a rapidly increasing circulation of polit-
ical information (PTI 2019). Meanwhile, the large Indian news media and
its journalists have been witnessing the moving away of news audiences
from their mainstream medium to social platforms. Several articles have
been published by the Indian mainstream media, warning of the dangers
of believing news published on social media platforms (Ghosh and Desai
2019; Purohit 2019). A number of established Hindi and English dailies
with some of the largest brands and circulation in the country also took
out a full-page advertisement to underscore the need for verification and
the role of journalists in providing readers with credible information dur-
ing the election period (Roy 2019). The advertisement ‘Print Is Proof’
featured a pointed editorial against the sharing of ‘fake news’ and ‘misin-
formation’ on social media platforms during the Indian elections. The
campaign, sponsored by media outlets (including The Hindu group, The
232 U. RODRIGUES

Times of India and Dainik Bhaskar among others) emphasised that print
newspapers were still the most reliable source of news. Raj Jain, the CEO
of publishing company BCCL, told a reporter that before news was car-
ried in their newspaper, it had to go through a rigorous process of being
checked and rechecked, unlike digital news. The ‘Print Is Proof’ advertise-
ment stated:

For us, the starting point of any story is verification. But for social media, its
sensation. And if a story doesn’t check out, it can always be deleted. As
newspapers, we have no such luxury. You see, it’s hard to go back on your
word when millions have a copy of it. So, we do it right. We take the time
to verify all the information before we call it news. News that’s backed by
fact. Print is proof. (Print Is Proof 2019)

Large advertising firms agree with the print publishers’ view that news-
rooms have a strong verification system. Girish Agarwal, promoter direc-
tor at DB Corporation Ltd., noted that the growing circulation of print
media was a sign of growing trust in the medium as a credible source of
news (Roy 2019). The Indian mainstream media—more than 100,000
news publications, over 850 television channels and nearly 1100 radio sta-
tions—continues to grow in extremely competitive market conditions
with increasing circulation, viewership and advertisement revenue. Print
readership increased to 425 million in the first quarter of 2019 and televi-
sion channels reached nearly 77 per cent of households in India (John
2019). Meanwhile, FM radio is also reaching an increasing number of
Indians, along with public service broadcasting network All India Radio
and community radio stations, radio in India has a reach of over 90 per
cent. The Indian media and entertainment sector reached took Rs.
1.67 trillion ($23.9 billion) in 2018, a growth of 13.4 per cent, according
to an end-of-year Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and
Industry report (Mukherjee 2019). Advertising revenue in India is
expected to grow by over 11 per cent in 2019 on the back of the national
elections and the Cricket World Cup, according to IPG Mediabrands
(Laghate 2018). Although television continues to be the dominant media
platform, with 39 per cent advertising spend in India, followed by print,
the advertising revenue spent on digital media is projected to grow rapidly
to about 21 per cent share of total advertising expenditure. The growth in
advertising dollars spent on digital platforms is spurred by the increasing
access to the internet and mobile-phone ownership.
 11 POLITICAL COMMUNICATION ON SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS 233

Erosion of Public Trust in News and Information

The Indian media has bucked the downward trend in profitability experi-
enced by many of their counterparts in more mature media markets in the
Western countries due to increasing literacy and a growing population.
However, subsequent government efforts to expand the availability of
communication technologies have led to a change in the communication
landscape in India. The opening of the communication industry to com-
petition over the past two decades has resulted in more than a billion
mobile-phone subscriptions, and with the recent drop in the price of
mobile data, access to the internet has improved dramatically. As noted
above, Indian internet access is fuelled by mobile-first, which is not only
powering away in urban India, but making inroads in rural India too
(Exchange4media 2019). The aspiring class is increasingly connected to
the world via their mobile phones. As such, in a two-step process, internet-­
connected and often educated young Indians have become a conduit of
political communication in their local networks, in addition to the vast
media industry in India. The public sphere in India has bifurcated the
function of print and broadcast mass media within a burgeoning net-
worked society. However, there is a cost to such a rapid increase in access
to data, mobile phones and an unregulated public sphere, where anyone
can post and share information, verified or not. The mainstream media’s
verification process cannot compete with the virality of social media mes-
sages. The sharing of news and information related to politics has also led
to sharing of fake news, misinformation and disinformation, where there
are only miniscule checks and balances despite the efforts of the ECI,
social media companies’ increased monitoring and fact-checking organisa-
tions (Valenzuela et al. 2019).
Traditionally, an active and independent news media is considered to be
critical for holding to account those in positions of power—that is those
responsible for public good in government, corporations and executive
positions. The free flow of verified news and information provided by
journalism has been seen to build communities and empower people to
participate in the creation of their own governments. However, over the
decades, news media outlets have become profitable businesses, part of a
larger entertainment industry, often running their own agenda, or the
agendas of other powerful interests. In India too, journalism has generally
been respected because of its association with independence from British
rule. Despite its commercial ethos, the print media, which surpassed
234 U. RODRIGUES

100,000 news publications in India in 2018, has always been seen as a

plurality of ideas, healthy for democracy. Following economic reforms in
the early 1990s and subsequent advances in technology, television in India
flourished. Today, there are 850 television channels, with more than half
of them covering news. The initial heydays of broadcast media being freed
from government ownership and the increase in quality and quantity of
news in the 1990s and 2000s has given way to a cacophony of talking
heads on television screens (Rodrigues and Ranganathan 2015). In addi-
tion, in the 2010s, politicians calling out the news media as ‘news traders’
and highlighting the news media’s weaknesses due to a focus on profit,
sensationalism and partisan reporting damaged the brand of journalism in
India (Purohit 2019; Rodrigues and Ranganathan 2015).
With politics shifting to social media platforms, where the distribution
of unfiltered expressions of ideas, views and news remains unregulated,
audiences are enjoying the affordances provided by these social platforms.
In the post-truth era, the menace of ‘fake news’ and misinformation on
encrypted services such as WhatsApp during India’s various state and
national 2019 elections, has seriously eroded the public’s trust in the
information they consume from various sources. There is also a general
distrust of news that one does not agree with. This erosion of trust stem-
ming from social media news ironically seems to have had an impact on
the credibility of mainstream journalism too (Newman et al. 2019), which
is already struggling to be heard in the cacophony of media messages com-
ing from hundreds of television channels, numerous news sites and several
social networking platforms. The expansion of television had already cre-
ated extremely competitive market conditions, in which most of the
national television channels remained focused on a handful of news sto-
ries, with wall-to-wall coverage provided on breaking news stories, such as
the release of a captured Indian pilot by Pakistan in March 2019. If televi-
sion has turned politics into talking-heads screaming at each other, the
social media’s free-for-all is creating a public sphere where there are no
limits in public discourse. The circulation of fake news, mis- and disinfor-
mation and unfiltered partisan views is creating an atmosphere of distrust
all around. The improving access to mobile data and other media tech-
nologies has connected a large proportion of the Indian population to the
internet, but the level of literacy, particularly media literacy, has remained
questionable. Indian citizens’ trust in direct, but often unverified, mes-
sages has resulted in mob lynching and deaths, leaving the news media and
local law enforcement authorities helpless (Morris 2018).
 11 POLITICAL COMMUNICATION ON SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS 235

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 CHAPTER 12

Portfolios of Fear and Risk in Platform News

Hrishikesh Arvikar

Platform Politics and Platform News

When Noam Chomsky was asked about Russia’s interference in the 2016
US elections, he noted that America has interfered in several foreign elec-
tions itself. Chomsky’s pragmatic, if unpopular, observation was swiftly
borne out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which not only implicated
a number of Western governments and ‘technology companies’ in elec-
toral interference, but also revealed the strategic interventions of India’s
major political parties within our own much-vaunted democratic process.
Thus, while the centrality of social media platforms to political persuasion
has given rise to new modes of everyday politics (bordering variously upon
the comic, dangerous and absurd), the underlying impulse towards demo-
cratic subversion within and across state borders is nothing new in itself.
More broadly, these dynamics have set the current temper of politics in a
post-factual world, including in India. It is hardly surprising that, with the
rise of WhatsApp as India’s preferred mode of communication, a vitriolic
register of politics has spread virally through news clickbaits that peddle,

H. Arvikar (*)
University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 239

A. Athique, V. Parthasarathi (eds.), Platform Capitalism in India,
Global Transformations in Media and Communication Research - A
Palgrave and IAMCR Series,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44563-8_12
240 H. ARVIKAR

provoke or deny conspiracies, accusations and acts of violence. The sen-

sory environment of platform news is a highly charged and polarized pub-
lic domain that appears to have supplanted or co-opted the domain of
journalism in India, long a constitutionally protected and elite profession,
but now effectively channelled into the economic logics of telecoms pro-
viders and the cellular dispersal of urban street and village politics.
Paying attention to the co-evolution of a broader international phe-
nomenon of platform politics, this chapter attempts to track two facets of
the local story of platform news in India: (1) the expansion of the digital
media economy and its strategic imperatives in capturing the infrastruc-
ture that provide carriage to platform news, and (2) the interaction of
platform news with rise of platform politics, both in terms of resistance
and in terms of tacit and even explicit participation in the expanding port-
folios of fear and risk.

Standardization, Diversification and Sachetization

Several sweeping changes can be seen as India switches over to the digital
media economy from its earlier forms of public communication. In the
past couple of decades, we have moved from satellite to cloud and from
mode to code. It seems abundantly clear that the overwhelming focus is
not on content as a public good, but rather how it can be monetized, both
as a unit of data and a data point of influence at every procedural calcula-
tion of the digital machinery. In terms of regulation, the Indian situation
is relatively content-agnostic, but at the same time, it is identitarian divi-
sions that bring the eyeballs and footfalls to the digital bazaar. A represen-
tational essentialism thus occupies both lanes of identity and difference,
one where identity is qualified through stencils of caste, gender and reli-
gious forms of categorization, and, in the parallel track, where such plural-
ity becomes illusorily representative as identity warps inward. In an age of
superabundance, it would take us around 750 years to watch the content
uploaded on YouTube in just one day. Even amongst such apparent pleni-
tude, it is visibly clear that many forms and foci of information are being
left out, missed, ignored and trivialized under this emerging market
regime. It is implicitly accepted that millions of people will inevitably be
left out of the digital circuit of communication. As Bratton succinctly
puts it:
 12 PORTFOLIOS OF FEAR AND RISK IN PLATFORM NEWS 241

One of the key games for any architecture is based on who and what is inside
and/or outside. At a regional scale, who or what is not a migrant of one sort
or another? But in that solidarity, there are such differences: for some, that
status is a death sentence, and for others, it’s a token of privilege.
(Bratton 2018: 20)

Audiences are a vital component of the digital commodity logic beyond

the points of access and sale (see Athique 2019: 558). Indeed, they are
embedded as the drivers of today’s media architecture. Ostensibly, this
constitutes a ‘grassroots utopia’ where tastes become opinions, opinions
become facts, facts become truth, leaving the conception of journalists’
self-­identification as instructors of audiences blowing in the wind. Even as
audience mass increases, the mass audience dissipates as a mode of public
address, to be replaced by bracketed niches like Lallantop (owned by
Aroon Purie, from the India Today group, whose major shareholders are
the Birlas). In the era of targeted advertising and individuated newsfeeds,
a one-to-one correspondence is no longer necessary between editorial ide-
ologies and brand ownership. The Foundation for Independent Journalism
(FIJ) established by TheWire.in founders (Venu, Varadarajan and Bhatia)
is funded by the Independent and Public-Spirited Media Foundation
(IPSMF). Yet the very same organization funds Swarajya, a right-wing
mouthpiece. TV news channel NDTV was owned by left leader Brinda
Karat, Oswal and the same Rajeev Chandrashekhar (who was part-owner
in a later right-wing Republic channel), along with its founders Radhika
Roy and Prannoy Roy. Yet, NDTV is accused of non-disclosure of loans,
leading to allegations of being bought by Reliance. Firstpost is now entirely
owned by Reliance, as a part of its acquisition of CNN-TV18 group,
which was earlier owned by Raghav Bahl.
In 2014, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) was com-
pelled to raise a red flag over media ownership patterns resulting in an
inextricable nexus of politics and media patronage, which elicited this
response from Firstpost editor R. Jaganathan:

How do we know a media house not owned by a politician is telling the

truth too? […] Does non-ownership of media houses prevent a corporate
house from influencing it? Is the advertising rupee, or indirect benefits to
media editors, any less influential in the media?
242 H. ARVIKAR

With the following five points, Jaganathan sought to reassert press free-
dom, which was seemingly facing familiar threats, but also quietly going
through fundamental revision as digitality was being ushered into the very
temper of news-making:

Point 1—Bias and neutrality cannot be eliminated by any system […]

Point 2—If big media is anyway becoming unviable, how is restricting
funding from new sources going to do it any good? Will neutral media
be run by starving journalists?
Point 3—TRAI’s recommendations will have the unhealthy effect of push-
ing straightforward ownership of the media into surrogacy or benami
holdings. This is a move away from transparency, not towards it. […]
Point 4—The issue is competition. This is what should be facilitated, not
restrictions on current ownership or market shares, which may anyway
start falling in the internet age. By trying to keep people out, TRAI is
actually ensuring that all media ownership will get more concen-
trated. […]
Point 5—What is TRAI’s locus standi in making recommendations in areas
outside telecom? Is TRAI a telecom regulator or media regulator?
(Jaganathan 2014, August 13)

This posture has not aged well, particularly the last point, as we now
have immensely and undeniably porous borders between telecom and
media. News now operates in a digital era, where standardization, diversi-
fication and sachetization are embedded into media commodities by the
economic, social and political institutions that shape their production.
Standardization operates with the idea of sustenance of form, packaging
and content. Thus, the vertical and horizontal mediation through scroll-
ing of newsfeeds of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter with the editorial-
ized air of mystery around the content ensures that the user is attracted, if
not addicted, to the content and will click on it to access more informa-
tion. Sample the clickbait: We don’t know about cleaning toilets, but these
five things an elected member of Parliament should never do, or These are the
tariffs India is putting on America in response to Trump’s policy. Many such
stories, the origins of which lie in the click-baiting method refined by
Buzzfeed, are built with arresting captions. This format was being emu-
lated by other venturing into platform media until bigger smartphone
screen, particularly or Chinese Xioami, Red Mi and Real Me forayed into
the Indian market, allowing for horizontal widescreen displays on the
 12 PORTFOLIOS OF FEAR AND RISK IN PLATFORM NEWS 243

smartphones. The technological obsolescence of a smart phone device

plays an important role in formatting and reformatting reception tech-
niques of platforms news media.
There has also been a need for content diversification, since the lan-
guage and dialect that NDTV uses is centred around Delhi and its intel-
lectual gravitas and glitterati, which is often and easily critiqued by other
channels and newspaper outlets like Dainik Bhaskar and Jagran that oper-
ate in the Hindi heartland of North India. Diversification is thus enacted
by providing differing perspectives on the story that all nonetheless offer
allegiance to the political inclination of the news outlets and the current
ruling dispensation in India. In a country which speaks hundreds of lan-
guages, rallies its faith around million gods and goddesses, part of the
media diversification takes place by tapping into the diverse publics.
Moving away from earlier elite and foreign educated journalists, Lallantop,
which could best be translated as swagger, is a voice which compounds the
right amount of Bollywoodized hyperbole, juggling the language of the
‘rural cool’ with borrowed dialects from North India small towns. The
name itself has a behavioural informality of discussions of endless cups of
tea which are visible at every street corner. Historically, various regional
media have been owned by political parties or their leaders from Sharad
Pawar’s Sakal (Morning), Shiv Sena’s Saamna (Confrontation) to left-
inclined Telegraph in Bengal and Maran’s Sun TV down south to only
name a few. These mouthpieces often openly show party allegiances when
social issue need to up the ante and stoke fire.
To moderate such journalism of ideological interests, there are several
acts and quasi-judicial bodies which lay out norms, rules and regulations
for Indian media. However, media laws in India have not caught up with
ownership and distribution patterns. They are almost wilfully archaic. Up
until now, media regulations are constituted as balancing acts of not hurt-
ing sentiments of one or another set of interests. In all three instances that
I will consider here, NDTV, TheWire.in and Firstpost, the customary
models of ownership patterns have been supplanted by new mechanisms
of risk financing—through either loans or awards—effectively hedging
across the aisles of the political spectrum. While the state grapples with
formulating new media laws, it is the microfinancing in the new digital
economy which leads to sachetization. The move to formalization of
economy via digital transactions is far from complete, despite vigorous
enforcement by the state. Nonetheless, Bill Maurer’s work on mobile
money suggests mobile operators ‘turn towards a relatively untapped
244 H. ARVIKAR

market among the world’s poorest and, in the process, provide services
that enhance financial access. Profitability and financial inclusion go hand
in hand’ and hence become useful in ‘formatting the poor’ (Maurer 2012:
590). India immediately rushes towards a suite of mobile money apps
whose usage provides micro benefits, cross-subsidization and, above all,
features which cement the position of apps in platform architecture. As
Maurer predicts:

Each story depends on a specific formatting of a market—the creation of

individual people, in aggregate, in to a population and then a market seg-
ment. In the Empowerment Story, people have to first be made into ‘the
poor’ or ‘the unbanked,’ among whose chief problems in life is their lack of
access to financial services…. ‘transaction cost[s]’… ‘is a market device that
formats the client and the payments space into which the client is being
inserted’…. While formatting people as ‘the poor’, these market devices
foreground mobile technologies, and ‘the poor’ and their mobile devices
turn into a networked subject-object. (Maurer 2012: 597–598)

Similarly, news media ‘formats the poor’ with free news apps, where
sachetization of outrage and scandal offers the meta-narrative of nation
product in a byte-sized form, ostensibly serving the interests of the poor,
who cannot afford to buy larger quantities of the same. NDTV or other
players sachetize their news stories and diversify their audience segments,
even though the composition of their news room is scarcely subject to
such gender and caste inclusivity. While on one hand, the political party
reaches its populace in their respective sachets facilitated by the news car-
rier, while the same channel continues to purvey exclusivity in its English
language market. Thus, the combined strategies, diversification and sache-
tization widen the spectrum of the news commodity, without diversifying
the mentality of news. As an aside, it is also worth mentioning that the
double bind of linguistic and class divide can be noted through a mere
translation. NDTV also has an elite lifestyle channel called NDTV Good
Times. Good Times can be translated as Achcha Samay or Achche Din.
Incidentally, this translation became popular with the masses as the tagline
of BJP’s 2014 campaign, designed by Bombay ad guru Piyush Pandey, of
Ogilvy Mather.
 12 PORTFOLIOS OF FEAR AND RISK IN PLATFORM NEWS 245

Consolidating Stacks and Bundles

In order to understand how the three commodity logics of standardiza-
tion, diversification and sachetization are built into the core infrastructure
of Digital India, I will turn to examining the macrological changes brought
about by the emergence of Reliance Jio as the largest phone carrier in
India. Reliance has been a media and telecom player for a long time now,
although Reliance’s initial models of CDMA phones tanked. From around
16 middle-rung players active in India’s telecom markets in 2009–2010
(of which Hutchison Essar [later Vodafone], Idea and Airtel were the
leading market players), only three private players remain in 2019–2020
(Hill and Athique 2018): Airtel, Vodafone-Idea (a merger) and Reliance.
This tripartite distribution of power can be considered apart from the
state-held company Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL). For its part,
BSNL, the underlying public network run by the Government of India,
has been steadily selling off its reach, allowing Jio to spread rapidly across
the communication layer and position itself as the national champion for
5G investment. Since the 2019 national elections BSNL has been in limbo,
with its employees unpaid since the result was announced. By contrast, the
‘free’ data availability offered by Reliance Jio since 2015, has swiftly cap-
tured the lion’s share of Indian telecom market.
Rather it seems that Reliance has moved closer to the government and
its core ambitions than the company that the government actually owns.
But unlike the notorious ‘license Raj’ era of the 1970s and 1980s, which
had fairly explicit nepotistic arrangements, the affinities between the
Government of India and the dominant players in telecoms only tend to
reveal themselves at opportune moments. In 2016, a government alloca-
tion of bandwidth shows that Jio got around 20 MHz (more than BSNL)
in Tamil Nadu. Furthermore, Reliance was advantaged by the sudden
decision to usher in the ‘Bill and Keep’ system to replace the earlier inter-
connection usage charges (IUC) model, (which levied from the consumer
for connecting across two different telecom service providers). As the for-
mer head of Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited (VSNL) (later Tata), BK
Syngal writes:
246 H. ARVIKAR

There have been demands to bring in the Bill and Keep (BAK) system and
do away with the interconnection usage charges (IUC) in the telecom
industry. The BAK regime, it is said, will usher in consumer benefits and
technology upgradation. But little has been said on why IUC should con-
tinue to remain in force … IUC is still an acceptable model, based on the
simple logic that operators need to recover the cost they have invested in
developing the network. While no one can argue against the fact that com-
petition is necessary, it cannot be generated at the expense of existing players
and for the benefit of newcomers. Moreover, the Indian market dynamics
are not prepared to move towards a BAK regime due to inherent asymme-
tries. The need of the hour is tariff rebalancing in order to make full use of
technological evolution towards data, and not shortcuts such as eliminating
IUC. (Syngal, B. 2018, March 9)

After Jio’s entry in the market, the switch from IUC to ‘bill and keep’
(BAK) was not only favourable to them economically but also at the tech-
nological level, since it essentially allowed a change in calling modality
from circuit-switching network calling to data transfer (as small packets of
data get transferred over to connect the phone call). From the users’ per-
spective, only Jio-to-Jio calls have the 4G Voice over Long-Term Evolution
(VOLtE) mechanism, as used in Viber and WhatsApp. Hence, they clearly
preferred a single device which provides more connectivity and is virtually
‘free’ to use, as the call is converted to free data packets. Of course, while
the data packets could be assumed to be free, they are linked a host of
consumer product services. Thus, along with the stacking of infrastruc-
ture, the other feature of this emergent media economy is commodity
bundling. Simply put, where several media products come under one pro-
vider gateway, and where one product offers some discount or cashback
upon the other, a bundle of commodities is created. With this push and
pull intrinsic to the platform economy, it is the horizontal expansion across
businesses that are ‘integrated’ so that every click, share, like, follow and
subscription can be monetized (Athique 2019). What else can define these
interlaced data packets than the market logics of standardization and
sachetization?
In the news portfolio, like a Bollywood film regaling domestic clashes
in business families, the long-running dispute between Ambani brothers
has led to Jio (Mukesh Ambani’s endeavour) claiming that Reliance will
default on their earlier telecom company R-Com (Anil Ambani’s brain-
child). Beyond the operatics of sibling rivalries, the larger point is that in
return for access to free data availability, Jio demands its users’
 12 PORTFOLIOS OF FEAR AND RISK IN PLATFORM NEWS 247

fingerprints, Aadhaar IDs and customer bank details. It is no accident that

it is becoming a primary instrument for baking surveillance capitalism into
India’s digital ecosystem. It is, in that respect, rather like Paytm, the
mobile payments provider that uses Prime minister Narendra ‘Modi’s
photograph prolifically in its advertisements and gets only marginally fined
for its proven unconstitutional usages of customer data. As things stand,
the increasingly centralized regime exercised by home minister Amit Shah
and PM Modi ensures that these corporations can operate laissez-faire
beyond constitutional bounds, even if not everyone is taken with the zeit-
geist of disruption, including their competitors:

The Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) has called the intercon-
nect regulation disastrous and has decided to go to the court. In a strong
worded reaction, Vodafone said, ‘This is yet another retrograde regulatory
measure that will significantly benefit the new entrant alone while adversely
affecting the rest of the industry as a whole. Unless mitigated, this decision
will have serious consequences for investment in rural coverage, undermin-
ing the government’s. (Singh, P. 2017, September 20)

Jio baits its integrated commodity with free data that can be used for
endless consumption of ancillary products. Jio has also teamed up with
five other companies to provide international connections across the
world. By such means, Jio has captured the mobile consumer market with
its predatory pricing in the first instance, but the monopoly ambitions of
Jio spread far beyond the telecom sector. Now akin to the Foxtel device
which rolls Wi-Fi internet at 4G speed, various subscriptions of fiction and
non-fiction TV and platform shows and gaming into one device, Jio has
introduced its new toy called ‘Gigafiber’, which will also provide access to
films on the first day of their theatrical release, which the consumers can
watch sitting at home (Bhushan, K. 2019, August 12). Reliance Jio is
either present or entering in all domains of the media economy in some
form or other. For example, Jio bought Saavn music app and created seven
of its own apps for entertainment, and it is conducting rapid acquisitions
of numerous digital platforms which create fiction (web series and films)
and non-fiction (documentaries), apart from establishing its own Jio
Studios. Since 2008, Reliance has loaned money to ETV and Network 18
and by the end of 2012, its holdings have made it a de facto media mogul
in the classic sense.
248 H. ARVIKAR

Reliance Jio still faces resistance from other players providing intercon-
nection points. A key requirement for this data packets to travel is through
optic fibre, so even after their losses in the telecom sector—particularly
after the Docomo partnership came to a standstill—the Tatas are still key
players in the communication layer. Completing its first round-the-earth
mapping of cable as early as 2012 with their fibre optic cables, Tatas have
had invisible but nonetheless ubiquitous presence having practically cov-
ered the planet with MPLS (multi-protocol label switching), laying out
the infrastructure for ‘end-to-end’ calling (Curtis 2012, March 12). How
do these deep market layers intersect within India’s emerging digital archi-
tectures, that is, within the prevailing code of production? Benjamin
Bratton’s explication is the hexagram architecture called the Stack. The
media is very literally stacked on top of another on the smartphone as
apps; it is stacked as they replace one another on-screen on TV, on multi-
ple, simultaneous tabs on the internet. Six key locations of the Stack
according to Bratton are City, Address, User, Interface, Earth and Cloud
(Bratton 2016: 11).
Where they occupy intersectionality in the Indian context is the inter-
face of the website called, unsurprisingly, India Stack. This intersection of
imaginaries (social, institutional, infrastructural and political) has four lay-
ers: presence-less, paperless, cashless and consent layer. In this top-­
downing process, consent comes last from the API makers’ point of view.
They are, after all, the first layer users who enjoy an enhanced connection
with government, businesses, start-ups and developers. The current catch-
phrase, ‘Data is (Srnicek 2017: 40),’ which aligns financial and infrastruc-
ture interests with blue sky data-mining, is made attractive primarily
because of the presence-­less and ubiquity of individuals, publics, institu-
tions, states and global networks. Bundles, stacks and data are being
brought together, as the ruling mechanism of digital economics and coer-
cive politics. To this end, humans as resources and unwitting labour are
bundled into integrated commodities priced by media markets (Athique
2019). However, this sweeping enclosure should not be heedlessly under-
stood as a post-­human hybridity of technological interaction, since

[h]ybrid terms delay recognition and defer understanding of what requires

our most audacious attention. So instead of piling on more hybrids, excep-
tions, and anomalies, we need a glossary for a new normal, and for its design
and redesign. (Bratton 2018: 7)
 12 PORTFOLIOS OF FEAR AND RISK IN PLATFORM NEWS 249

The new normal is not simply aggressive investments in infrastructural

monopolies, but also the hysterical imperatives for the swift on-sale of data
portfolios loaded with fear and risk. This underlying dynamic of the digital
infrastructure informs the process of news-making by porous yet uneven
media meta-narratives, insurrectional regionalism from below, as the event
line of market concentration is breached at the top.

Disrupting the Disruption

Chakravartty and Roy write about the 2014 elections and the BJP win,
denoting that it is ‘mediated populism’ that determines the logics of our
(Chakravartty and Roy 2015: 313). But, unlike European histories of fas-
cism, India has not until now seen an efficient combination of corporatism
and right-wing political parties capable of assuming control over its public
sphere. While Trump and Putin can smirk about non-traceability of elec-
tion-rigging as a joke, the Indian story of the nexus of media and politics
has always been regarded as a serious (Department, O. J. U. S. 2019).
There is no doubt, nonetheless, that is has operated with similar, unreflex-
ive and increasing impunity. As an intrinsic part of this process, the space
occupied by critical and investigative journalism has been closed down by
the diarchy of corporate media infrastructure and authoritarian govern-
ment. Thus: ‘It is this ‘apex’ market that dominates everyday market dis-
courses transmitted by the proliferation of media channels’ (Parthasarathi
and Athique 2019: 4). Occasionally, however, something unbundles itself
and seeps through the layers of the stack.
Cobrapost, a not-for-profit organization led by Anirudh Bahal special-
izes in such media ‘stings’, typically with sensationalist and scandalous
overtones. To date, Cobrapost claims to have ‘exposed’ numerous instance
of corruption such as buying seats in the parliament, ministers demanding
bribes to raise questions, black money laundering everywhere, social media
movements organizing fake likes and followers, ministers lobbying for for-
eign firms, instances of paid and fake news across 36 major media outlets,
and the siphoning of money through shell companies across the economy.
Kalyani Chadha notes that when such sensational forms of provocative
journalism become normalized, and when such scams are repeatedly put
out in public eye, their homogenization of national dissolution ‘not only
creates a sort of false equivalence between scandals but also elides very real
differences in their implications for the public interest’. Scandals get con-
flated onto one another like a clockwork set of exposes and result into
250 H. ARVIKAR

what Chadha calls ‘scandal fatigue’ as ‘viewers’ check-out’ (Chadha 2019:

242). What still seeps through could perhaps be seen in an example from
a 2018 sting by Cobrapost where a senior member of the Paytm mobile
transaction app admitted to giving away the personal information data of
users from the volatile region of Kashmir to the Prime Minister’s office on
request.
Being remediated as blobs of code allows for the territorial conflation
of Jammu into Kashmir, and for lurkers to read the affected people as
either militants or veiled Pakistani interests who, by the ritualized,
rehearsed, coloured definitions of the Indian right wing, are anti-India
and pro-militancy. More broadly, reformatting all people as codes seems to
be an essential aspect of framing people in the immediacy of an identitar-
ian crisis imposed from the centre. In facilitating the datafication of dis-
senting identities, Paytm readily and routinely compromised personal data
information of their online transaction customers to gain favour with the
government. The illegality of such an arrangement was itself swiftly
recoded, since the government can invoke sweeping concerns of national
security, allowing it to plug and play with porous data systems like Aadhaar
and the locative and financial accounts intrinsic to the format of digital
citizenship. Via this mentality, the amended National Security Act was eas-
ily passed in the parliament, despite opposition parties calling out the BJP
for making routine provisions which codify India as a ‘Police State’. The
dual inside-outside moment of expanding border and narrowing defini-
tions of citizenship in digital times provides the pathway for the Indian
government passing the Citizen Amendment Act in 2019, which offers
sanctuary on the selective basis of religion, marking India as a sanctified
technocracy where only Muslims are not welcome.
Another Cobrapost hidden-video sting shows actor Vivek Oberoi offer-
ing to propagate the schemes of PM for payment, preferably cash, amongst
his fan base. Oberoi, of course, had just played the role of PM Modi in a
puerile biopic, intended for release during the 2019 general election, but
put on hold after a ruling from the Election Commission. Oberoi is seen
in the video sting arguing that his desire to participate in the propaganda
machine results from a desire to draw attention of the society towards
issues of national development. He energetically refreshes the memory of
the reporter about the merit of governmental schemes, while informing
him that the ripple effect of his Twitter, Facebook and Instagram influence
would constitute around two crore people as footfall. Routinely lacklustre
celebrities like Oberoi look for capital induced activities such as election
 12 PORTFOLIOS OF FEAR AND RISK IN PLATFORM NEWS 251

campaigning to remain in the limelight. The footprint of the somewhat-­

celebrity here is thus indicative of mundane political opportunism from
Bollywood, which for Modi lends a viscerality to his propaganda. As a
business proposition, neither film or news media break-even in terms of
their investments, hence the political and figurative impact of such invest-
ments comes to the fore. Investments in what Srinivas calls ‘economic
externalities’ are ‘the unintended consequences…embedding corporate,
religious and political capital into the media markets’ (Srinivas 2018:
170–172). In such an environment, despite its regularized expose of
errant celebrities, politicians and businessmen, Cobrapost’s aesthetic of
disruption remains a minor ripple in the broader currents of incitement,
accommodation and impunity.

The Commodity of Fear

Around 2006–2007, in early days of monetizing SMS functions, the news
media started cultivating the public opinion poll, routinely asking the peo-
ple to consolidate a generic opinion. The ticker tactic rapidly moved to
show the changing status of the stock market, while the letterbox format
demanded more attention towards block headlines. Soon, Twitter hashtags
found their own spaces and would casually reflect political favouritism of
whichever party and/PR business house the news channel had aligned
itself with. Hologram effects were used from general elections to the
cricket world cup. As the velocity of news increased, there was insufficient
time or inclination for a news channel to accommodate the panellists, who
are poles apart from each other in opinion as well as location. Arnab
Goswami, earlier an anchor on Times Now, now creator and part-owner of
Republic TV on one end uses his decibel power to shut others down and
caters mainly to corporate yuppies, while Ravish Kumar from NDTV India
on the other speaks in a colloquial North Indian Hindustani to reach out
to the heartland middle classes. Kumar does formal experiments on his
show including blacking out screens to avoid the viscerality of the visual
and the verbalization of bigotry-ridden arguments which are staple on
other news channels. However, it is anchored in the voice of anchor sitting
in media concentration of Bombay and Delhi. The former is the economic
capital; the latter is the political one. For such diversification of the televi-
sual, Akshaya Kumar identifies some key features of this current simula-
crum of ‘liveness’ which is not live in fact, spirit or temper. He posits that
the liveness-as-ontology becoming recoded by the digital as material and
252 H. ARVIKAR

affect (Kumar 2015: 539). Kumar adds: ‘The problem of liveness is two-­
fold: (1) the analytical gap between content and audiences collapses and
(2) the news media works out convenient exceptionalism by which spaces
away from the newsroom are further removed’ (Kumar 2015: 539).
Regarding the screen affordances and presentation style of the TV
news, Kumar notes: ‘Space in televisual liveness is doubly constructed.
The newsroom becomes the enunciative space, and the anchor sitting atop
it becomes the referee for the non-enunciative space (…) the audience was
thrown into an ecology in which relatively invisible class-based antago-
nisms were made visible to articulate scandal’ (Kumar 2015: 539). Apart
from Kumar’s succinct observations about visual grammar, social structure
of class divides, a lot changes with the inauguration of automation in the
digital news form. In Automating the News, Diakopoulos informs us
‘there’s almost no facet of the news production pipeline, from information
gathering to sense-making, storytelling, and distribution that is not
increasingly touched by algorithms’ and that ‘anything lying outside the
bounds of what is quantified is inaccessible to the algorithm, including
information essential to making well-informed ethical decisions’
(Diakopoulos 2019: 8–9). Eubanks writes eloquently of how automating
‘systems’ lead to inequalities. Telling the American story, she notes—
‘People of colour, migrants, unpopular religious groups, sexual minorities,
the poor, and other oppressed and exploited populations bear a much
higher burden of monitoring and tracking than advantaged groups’
(Eubanks 2018: 3). More importantly, she critiques the celebration of
technological potential merely because poor have access to them. She
notes, ‘technologies of poverty management are not neutral. They are
shaped by our nation’s fear of economic insecurity and hatred of the poor;
they in turn shape the politics and experience of poverty’ (Eubanks
2018: 3).
From local players rooted in regional politics, actors across the aisles
venturing their own YouTube channels, there is an endless cycle of narra-
tives and counter-narratives. TheWire.in carried the similar conspiratorial,
at times alarming and reactionary ones. One opinion piece in The Wire
reads—‘What If This Is Hindu Rashtra?’ Although its goal and temper are
different from the right-wing automated bots’, trolls’ propaganda. The
wire has diversified into Hindi, Urdu and Marathi languages. On this wid-
ening political spectrum, Firstpost made clickbaits out of the names of
Jawaharlal Nehru University students—Kanhaiya Kumar, Umar Khalid,
Shehla Rashid and actress and former Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU)
 12 PORTFOLIOS OF FEAR AND RISK IN PLATFORM NEWS 253

student Swara Bhaskar after the 9 February 2016 event organized to con-
demn state oppression, where allegedly anti-national sloganeering took
place on JNU campus. The government argued that the slogans chanted
should be brought under the definition of ‘sedition’, a colonial era law
that charges people for inciting violence against the government through
speech. The charge sheet was filed just before 2019 election, as Kumar was
widely touted to win the local seat of his hometown Begusarai. In 2016,
Kumar was immediately taken into custody, since he was the student union
leader at the time of the protests. After Kumar securing bail and returned
to campus, he made emphatic speeches, carrying the vocal charge of
India’s increasingly marginalized publics.
In this example, the utterance of what is now popularly known as the
‘Azadi’ (freedom) chant went viral and thereby altered its form through
the data packets of the media. It became a YouTube hit after local DJ Dub
Sharma turned parts of the speech given by Kumar into a rap song, which
became an anthem for youth, subsequently also used in Bollywood film—
Gully Boy (Akhtar et al. 2019), about a rapper’s life in a slum in Bombay.
Finally, it was appropriated by both the ruling party and the opposition for
their campaign songs. Each version shows a generational loss of fidelity
from slogans and meanings which in their earliest forms were raised by
Pakistani feminists protesting their own government in the late 1980s.
The film drops the slogans raised about caste and gender inequality, while
the parties employed their own media PR management to make eliminate
all the intended rebellion in the slogan song to highlight issues of ‘devel-
opment’ and ‘progress’. Automation and the subsequent virality does not
of itself necessitate the exclusion of human actors, but it typically leads to
such refractions of the intended message. Furthermore, as the slogan
became a digital commodity, it was stacked against a vice-regal legacy of
sedition and oppression, which has itself been reconstituted by Amit Shah
in the age of datafication. Sedition laws have made a comeback, spurred by
social media affordances and reinforced by the savvy bots that have the
ability to track and trace citizen identities online as well as conveniently
fake collective grassroots participation when needed (Arora 2019: 47).
Arora argues that old and new media act in concert and also reconfig-
ure the earlier caste and class divides. Thus, media diversity does not nec-
essarily result in political inclusion. Nor does fake news remain exclusive to
the metropolis, since it finds its most virulent form in small town and
grassroots moralism. Such multitudes of voices could be heard in the latest
caste-ridden drama of Sakshi Mishra’s marriage with her lover Ajitesh.
254 H. ARVIKAR

Most of these memes moralize her conduct of marrying out-of-caste and

‘going public,’ ultimately, seen as defaming her family members. With
twists and turns of a bad, foamy TV soap opera, Sakshi’s story is indicative
of deep-seated social opprobrium. NDTV, from its national capital stand-
point, reorganized the debate about bodies, taint and endogamous rela-
tions into realm of urban discursivity by giving a platform to Dalit leaders
Chandrashekhar Azad and Rahul Sonpimple to reflect on caste atrocities.
Elsewhere, strategies of diversification and sachetization milked the story,
by foregrounding the conduct of the lower-caste boy Ajitesh smoking
marijuana, or using a different name in social media profile, or the couple
breaking off their engagement and then getting back together, or the
court deciding their marriage is valid, or another entirely unrelated couple
being abducted from the court premises the same day the court certifies
the marriage. The hyperbole of the subject of the debate—Is India more
casteist than we were ever before?—clearly exuded the rising paranoia as
communal confrontation gathers pace.

Portfolios of Fear and Risk

The commodity of fear cuts across all channels, along with and not beside
their political inclination, and after the advent of social media, it polarizes
people across the political spectrum with a relentless velocity. As we have
seen, this strategic digitality does not operate only through the right-wing
inclined media which perpetuates fear and post-factual stories. It also
infuses the language used by liberal left-inclined media as it demonstrates
its own knee-jerk reactionary politics. Sides are readily taken. Soon after
the 2019 elections, TheWire.in had several defamation cases, filed against
them. Anil Ambani (‘allegedly’ involved in the Rafaele weapon scam)
slapped 28 media houses with defamation cases, and very few would dare
to bring such investigations regarding Mukesh Ambani’s part of the
Reliance conglomerate. Mainstream media outlets were compelled by the
hedging imperatives of the democratic spectacle to be at least partly critical
of Modi government during election season, but swiftly returned to their
customary servility once the tally was in. As the new normal became fur-
ther entrenched, eminent journalists like Punya Prasoon Bajpai, Abhisaar
Sharma, Barkha Dutt and Vinod Dua had to leave their earlier media
houses and move to smaller digital setups due to pragmatic changes in the
editorial line of thinking.
 12 PORTFOLIOS OF FEAR AND RISK IN PLATFORM NEWS 255

Under the gathering clouds of automation and authoritarianism, it is

obviously pertinent to give critical attention to the algorithmic logics
through which clickbaits, trolls and bots have optimized hate culture and
fear mongering. What has made this age of trolls both possible and per-
missible? Can we stare down the imposed and implied threats of automa-
tion and exclusion and take effective responsibility for the design and
redesign of our new normal, rather than acceding so readily to technologi-
cal determinism and fatalism, urban dystopias, resurgent feudal pasts, dis-
orienting temporalities and cascading scales of data generation? Can we
move away from ever more insistent apocalyptic visions of the future
towards actually being aware of the ethical choices demanded by our pres-
ent circumstances? It seems not. Amit Shah’s digital scrutiny of citizenship
is designed to border, order and number citizens, and asks them to repro-
duce documents from before 1971 to threaten the basic securities of legit-
imate citizenship. Yet, the rational processes have served this irrational
impulse poorly. The hastily done citizenship tests on the brink of 2019
election results has shown that even the majoritarian Hindus do not have
the required documents to remain in the matrix of Digital India. Currently
millions of people have legitimate fears over their citizenship status. Can
such portfolios of fear and risk be offset by further infrastructural or click-
bait interventions?
What, then, is the news but a meta-narrative of our national anguish?
Discourses of rationality in India have been paralysed in recent years by a
collapsing tunnel vision. Whether it be NDTV or The Wire.in or Firstpost,
the language is hyperventilated, every story shrill and scandalous, every
reaction amplified and magnified, and every aversion or expression of out-
rage riddled with sentimentalism about the past and scepticism about the
present. The aporia of our situation is that while fear permeates through
the veins of media and society, the panacea of the market is cannot hold up
as a repository of deferred hope. We do not perhaps even feel the need to
default wilfully like Greece, since a majority of Indians are still not under
the formal economy and thus lack capacity to ‘drop out’ in such style.
While devastating measures like demonetization have resulted in the evi-
dent decline of GDP, India’s economic pundits remain committed to their
dream of achieving the status of a five trillion-dollar economy. Yet such
dreams are swiftly erased by quantitative interventions that leave value
perpetually unrealisable in the Global South. Only the narratives of
expanding media power and technological intrusion seem to be enduring.
256 H. ARVIKAR

Thus, we can be reassured to know that Reliance will be there to provide

security for the media conglomerates.
Nonetheless, fear is a commodity which media keeps investing in and
thereby furthers the gathering gloom. Sara Ahmed, notes that more than
hate, it is fear that leads us to violence. The diversification and, indeed,
sachetization, of caste, gender and class numbering are such that major-
ity, that is, Bahujans, are rendered as minorities, while 20 percent of the
entire population, that is, Brahmins, reassert their hegemony over jobs,
places, the national in politics and economic magicality and, by such
means, appear determined to represent themselves as a majority, albeit
one burdened its own portfolios of risk and, fear and doubt. Like risks in
the bourses, India has a list of national aspirations that can be betted
upon or against, just as the perpetually obscured failures of a farmer or
an apartment dweller can be betted upon by others, whose own posi-
tions, big and small, are increasingly insecure. Hence the formalization
of the economy by digital means amplifies the speculative interests of
markets by opening opportunities to bet on the fear of others. Even as
we run faster, the pace of the global race shrinks further, and those who
run and those who hedge bets against must suffer the demands of
enhanced velocity. We fall back on old strategies, like the Swachh
Bharat—Clean India campaign—Cleaning and cleansing, purification
and putrefaction, prescription and proscription—all go hand in hand. As
we wash our hands with increasing desperation, India is signing up for
sovereign bonds of 68,888 crores, the commodity form of a seemingly
unending crisis. The state participates along with corporate entities and
media to alter the technological, infrastructural, social and political
imaginaries for propagating the commodity of fear. As Ahmed notes:

It is the futurity of fear, which makes it possible that the object of fear, rather
than arriving, might pass us by. (…) We might note here that fear does
something; it reestablishes distance between bodies whose difference is read
off the surface, as a reading that produces the surface. (Ahmed
2004: 125–126)

It is obvious that apparatus of digital technologies escalates the risks

being taken and engenders new risks to be betted upon. On the platforms
provided by this carriage, the spectacle-oriented psychology of media
thrives on the growing portfolio of fear, stoking uncertainties which the
markets can monetize further. V.G. Siddharth, the owner of Café Coffee
Day (CCD), committed suicide after tremendous losses in the market, just
 12 PORTFOLIOS OF FEAR AND RISK IN PLATFORM NEWS 257

like the farmers who have been committing suicide in droves for the past
two decades of liberalization. This world on a wire, scaffolded by ever
more pipes and platforms that pass through oceanic optic fibre and inter-
net, simultaneously creates a metadata footprint that justifies India’s shift
to the dystopian meta-narrative demanded by authoritarian capitalism.
The perennial ambitions of imposing such efficiencies on India’s sache-
tized public consciousness inevitably founder amongst the competing log-
ics of consolidated infrastructures and the disintegrating commodities of
truth, trust and triumphalism. In such uncertain times, can the manifold
termites of a crumbling democratic edifice continue to frustrate the data
dumps and power-hungry stacks of technological territory? Distracted by
the splintered logics of platform news, we are left to swipe socialbots,
engross ourselves in the like-share-subscribe economy, re-circulate fake
news and boost the bandwidth of the profits being drawn from portfolios
of risk and fear.

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 PART V

Platform Cultures
 CHAPTER 13

Informality in the Time of Platformization

Akshaya Kumar

In the 1980s, the emergence of the audiocassettes led to an explosion of

recorded music throughout North India. Although North India is gener-
ally seen as the Hindi-speaking preponderance of India’s linguistic geog-
raphy, it is profoundly marked by a profusion of ‘dialects’ of this composite
language, most of which are older than modern standard Hindi and
remain closely linked to specific regions and population segments. In these
various so-called dialects, ‘vernacular’ musical traditions blending ideas of
‘folk’ with more ‘modern’ motifs were greatly enhanced and expanded by
the advent of portable media devices from the 1970s onwards. Vernacular
singer-performers began to record albums in studios, in Garhwali,
Haryanvi, Bhojpuri and other sub-regional languages on a large scale (see
Tripathy 2012, 2018). The volume of production has kept expanding
even as the recording and playback technologies have shifted from audio-
cassettes, to music videos (on video compact discs [VCDs] first and digital
video discs [DVDs] later) and to digital downloads for mobile phones (see
Rawlley 2007). In recent years, the mobile phone has become the primary
portable device on which sub-regional music videos thrive, whether the

A. Kumar (*)
IIT Indore, Indore, India
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 261

A. Athique, V. Parthasarathi (eds.), Platform Capitalism in India,
Global Transformations in Media and Communication Research - A
Palgrave and IAMCR Series,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44563-8_13
262 A. KUMAR

content is transferred offline on downloaded or streamed online (see

Mukherjee and Singh 2017; Rashmi 2018). The larger part of the ecology
of audiocassettes, discs, microSD cards and ‘Chinese’ mobile phones oper-
ates outside the formal economy. They constitute the thriving ‘do-it-­
yourself’ segment of media bazaars across the region, where repairing,
refurbishing and re-using are the hallmarks of electronic merchandize
retail. In this informal economy, the hardware is often ‘dodgy’ and the
‘software’ of recorded music—studio or elaborately edited videos of live
concerts—is typically transacted without any concern for copyright
whatsoever.
The eruption of vernacular media economy across North India has fun-
damentally altered the media production, distribution and consumption
landscape. Bhojpuri media in particular has spread across the length and
breadth of the country on account of labour migration. In the festival
season, one may then witness numerous concert performances in the sub-
urbs of Delhi and Mumbai, but also around other large cities of peninsular
India. This complicates the ‘regionality’ of vernacular media, since it is
shaped as much by the linguistic and cultural wealth of its ‘native’ region—
western Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh—as by the traffic of personnel,
imaginaries and devices (see Kumar 2016, 2018a). Vernacular media pro-
duction has traditionally been based out of Delhi studios, but in the last
decade, recording studios, mixing labs and various ad-hoc production
facilities have mushroomed all across the Bhojpuri-speaking region. The
relentlessly playful reconfiguration of regionality—with respect to the
audience demography—lends Bhojpuri media in particular a curious slip-
pery character that negotiates the national and the regional in site-specific
ways. While the claim to national territory may wash ashore more often
than in any other sub-regional media industry, in the suburbs of Mumbai,
the artists may not deter from singing a lavani (an erotic performance
constitutive of the Marathi tamasha) or addressing the audience as uttar
bhartiya (North Indians), instead of Bhojpuri bhaiyon (brothers).
Informality has been the lifeblood of vernacular media economies,
where freely sharing devices and copying media is routine practice (Lobato
and Thomas 2015). In fact, much of the media content thriving in these
economies only finds distribution through informal networks. Not only
do pirated/counterfeit cassettes or discs sell cheaper to a large audience of
limited means, but the practice copying itself allows pavement economies
to operate outside the logics of formal retail distribution. For a retailer in
a media market or a hawker on a pavement in Patna, it means not having
 13 INFORMALITY IN THE TIME OF PLATFORMIZATION 263

to contact a corresponding wholesaler, who would call the Delhi-based

production office to eventually receive more copies of a disc or a cassette
witnessing a surge in demand. They can simply respond to the immediate
demand by making more copies, without taking the undue risk of keeping
extra inventory. Informality in the distribution chain invariably reflects the
informal working conditions of marginal sellers as well as the purchasing
power and technological access of the buyers. Informal distribution chains
allow vernacular media markets to operate on the margins of larger formal
markets, without having to endure the same risks of capital flow and
investment, given that the financial securities required to hedge those risks
tend to be unavailable to them.
In a sense, the juxtaposition of formal and informal media markets
could be thought of as product-driven process versus services-driven sup-
ply. Formal products markets are guided by production infrastructures
whereas informal markets are driven by the service demand from custom-
ers. In a formal product-driven market, the products are designed as per
the existing knowledge of consumer demand, and then supported through
the retail chain with adequate advertising push to ensure consumers will
buy the media product catering to their demand. The informal markets
pushing a services-driven commodity, untethered as they are to the big
capital backing its retail distribution and advertising, tend to unhinge
themselves from the production-end calculations of consumer demand. As
a real-time service to the retail market, products are ‘copied into’ service
provision on the pavements. Thus, it is important to understand that a key
characteristic of informal media markets is that they are much less sensitive
to the advertising-driven product differentiations which operate at the
heart of capital-commodity dynamic of modern market economy. Partly,
this has to do with the broken links between production and distribution
ends, which renders informal markets their speculative character, outside
of the sophisticated consumer analytics formal markets are increasingly
saturated with.
Thus, for the informal economy, the prevailing idea is to attend to the
segmented customer base instead of trying to aggregate them within a
product-driven market, as formal industries tend to do. In that sense, the
ethos of the informal economy both predates and informs the shopfront
logics of the digital platforms that have emerged in India over the past
decade. Thus, even though discourses of platform economy have become
oriented to digital ecosystems, there is no reason why we cannot develop
a broader account of platform economy. Accordingly, this chapter
264 A. KUMAR

investigates the interactions between the distribution arsenal of platform

economies and the informal media markets that had emerged previously as
‘local’ pockets of growth outside the centrally controlled distribution of
mainstream media. A narrative of disruption prompts us to ask: How does
the rise of platform economy disrupt or reorganize these informal mar-
kets? A more evolutionary perspective prompts us to ask: How do con-
sumer formations in these informal markets inform the trajectory of
platformization in India? This is also a pertinent question to ask of the
business logics of digital platforms as an international phenomenon. This
chapter therefore gives some critical consideration therefore as to whether
we are witnessing the beginning of the end of informal media markets, or
their profusion via digital domains as web connectivity penetrates deeper.
As I will establish, the live concerts where thousands gather to witness
the artists perform through the night is a key site which escapes the grip
of platformization. Not only are such concerts the kernel of activity within
vernacular media economy, they are also a thriving site of informal
exchanges that slip outside the archival aggregation, either in an ad-hoc
manner at the arbitrage platforms or via algorithmic accumulation at
YouTube. Delineating three somewhat distinct tendencies of archive, I
discuss how the live concerts work against the distributive control of plat-
form economies by privileging the informal performative presence over
the relay of staged, orchestrated and edited media commodities. The
chapter, therefore, highlights one of the central features of vernacular
media that sits in a fundamental conflict with platform economies in media
industries.

Arbitrage Platforms: From Audio Cassettes

to Download Kiosks

Before the advent of audio cassettes, the centrepiece of media ecology in

rural and semi-urban North India was the radio, or its younger cousin, the
transistor. Men and women would congregate around the radio and per-
form domestic chores while listening to songs, news, or special pro-
grammes to address agrarian matters, or host a celebrity. All India Radio
curated programmes featuring film songs as the key entertainment pack-
ages on the device. They would be old and new Hindi film songs pro-
duced in Mumbai. With the entry of audio cassettes, ‘two-in-ones’ offering
both radio and cassette functions replaced the radio as the most desirable
domestic media device. Importantly, song lists could now be curated by
 13 INFORMALITY IN THE TIME OF PLATFORMIZATION 265

the owner of the cassette device, and recordable cassettes with song collec-
tions of personal favourites came into vogue. Even more importantly, cas-
settes allowed a large number of singers to record themselves through
production studios and access diffuse media markets neglected by the
major companies. This small revolution invigorated the music industry in
North India, a tale well recounted in Peter Manuel’s Cassette Culture
(1993). As a modality of both production and distribution, analogue tape
and audio cassettes were revolutionary. As opposed to the handful of
music companies which had previously aligned their music catalogues to a
mass market, an explosion of vernacular music industries in sub-regional
North Indian ‘dialects’ ushered in a host of genres, studios, artists and
audiences.
This expansion was, in many ways, akin to what is now labelled as plat-
form capitalism. For the vernacular media, a new interlocking ecology was
instantiated in which participants were drawn in and aggregated via new
shopfronts (studios, retail stores, performance stages). As Manuel has nar-
rated, political and religious campaigns would try to capture the public
formed at the sites of musical performance. The chart-topping songs pro-
duced for a political or religious campaign reflected the repurposing
potential of the vernacular media commodity via public spectacles of pop-
ular support. Thus, the celebrity performer became the most vital media-
tor across platforms and ideological tendencies in a series of informal
domains. As in platform business models, transactions between expression
and influence became subject to arbitrage by monetizing the congrega-
tions of live audiences (Tripathy 2018). The audio cassette thus consti-
tuted a platform that could replicate and repurpose the site of live
performances, thereby instantiating strategic arbitrage platforms such as a
neighbourhood ramayan path, akhand jagran or a political rally. Unlike
digital platforms of the present, there was no algorithmic aggregation at
the monetization end. Arbitrage without algorithms were the hotbed of
sharing, the basis of communal relations and the lifeblood of informal
economy. Thus, the calculation and billing of arbitrage, in a manner of
speaking, was crude, manual and speculative. These platforms were, none-
theless, geared towards increasing diversity and the multidirectional
growth of consumption sites, devices and retail.
The next major iteration in this trajectory of platformization, the VCD,
appended the music video to the sonic data previously circulated on cas-
settes. The cassettes did not die out for a long while, however, and a
majority of VCDs were simply direct recordings of live performances. In
266 A. KUMAR

this ecosystem, Bhojpuri music interlocked with Garhwali, Himachali,

Maithili and Haryanvi music, primarily in the Delhi studios, while the
audiovisual effects overlapped with various other video-making practices,
as in wedding and birthday videos, or religious and political campaigns.
Yet, as another arbitrage platform, VCD, and later DVD, were further
constituents of an arbitrage media economy that was not consolidated at
the capital ownership end. The informal music economy operated in paral-
lel to the practices that Adrian Athique has identified with the ‘disorga-
nized’ Indian film economy of the twentieth century, prior to its remarkable
consolidation in this century (2008). That is, cassettes, VCDs and DVDs
nonetheless enabled enormous growth in artists, songs and performances
through an economy which was interlocking in terms of flow of personnel
and tendencies, but fragmented in terms of capital and control. India’s
‘festival season’, from Chhatth all the way to Holi, would witness an annual
deluge of songs and music videos flooding the market, from which a more
limited stock of tunes, melodies and orchestration schemes would be
repurposed from the concert stage to the film songs. The volume of con-
tent could therefore be misleading, since it only signified the flow across
the interlocking arbitrage economy, in which platforms suspended in a
shifting media ecosystem variously attended to the expanding consumer
base of vernacular music.
While the VCDs/DVDs or cassettes required players which were often
owned by a group, cheap mobile phones gradually replaced them as a
more individually oriented interface for storage, recording as well as play-
ing media files. Given the weakness or unavailability of network connectiv-
ity, the success of the ‘smart’ mobile phone among the working classes was
primarily on account of its usage as a powerful media platform. The key
site for feeding these mobile phones was the download kiosk at a mobile
recharge shop (see Rashmi 2018). A vendor would typically need only ‘a
laptop full of songs and videos, a dongle to connect a memory card
through a USB port, and some format conversion software’ (Mukherjee
and Singh 2017, p. 260). Mukherjee and Singh wrestle with this question
with respect to the microSD cards that are central to the informal econ-
omy of download kiosks:

At one level, memory cards are platforms that consist of hardware and soft-
ware components that permit music to be recorded, stored, and played. At
another level, memory cards span different emerging platform systems of
audio/DVD players, mobile phones, and TV sets and become part of these
 13 INFORMALITY IN THE TIME OF PLATFORMIZATION 267

various sensory infrastructures. Memory cards reconfigure various mobile

media assemblages and create an ecosystem of platforms around them …
Indeed, the platform ecosystem consisting of Chinese DVD players, audio
players with Pepsi or Axe cases, and iPod knock-offs that memory cards
inhabit are accompanied by untaxed services, counterfeit goods, fake
­accessories, and unlicensed goods. Nonetheless, these informal platform
ecosystems also grow and innovate just like industry platforms, albeit in dif-
ferent ways and through different channels. And just like digital algorithm-
and-­interface-based online platforms, the not-always-online or rather offline
digital platforms … operate according to (informal) economic/business
models, are characterized by an ecosystem/network logic, and provide
spaces for users to participate and interact. (Mukherjee and Singh 2017,
pp. 261–263)

Rather than determining whether the mobile phone or the microSD

cards should be identified as platforms, Mukherjee and Singh argue for a
platform ecosystem which may not be entirely web based. Taking their
fundamental premise, that platform functions need to be understood
independently of their code-centric data structure, I argue that we must
also distinguish between platforms and platform economies. Thus, while I
conceptualize audio cassettes, video compact discs, digital versatile discs,
mobile phones and microSD cards as arbitrage platforms– parts of an elab-
orate interlocking network in which small differentials are monetized—I
also argue that they are not yet integrated into a platform economy. The
latter outcome hinges upon algorithms of aggregation and value-creation
via which modalities of ordinary sharing are dis-embedded from existing
social economies and re-embedded in new transactional forms built for
digital systems, which render them legible as transactions with a definite
footprint (see Athique et al. 2018a, b). As long as arbitrage platforms
remain outside algorithmic governance, they constitute platforms which
are relatively independent of a platform economy. As such, the aim of the
latter is to recruit the former into algorithmic governance, or what Beller
calls computational capital (Beller 2016a, 2016b). As we go along, there-
fore, it is important to remember that even though the platform economy
produces and sets into motion surplus time, attention, labour and prop-
erty, platforms are prerequisites for, rather than derivative of, the digital
drive for data accumulation.
268 A. KUMAR

Subscription Versus Advertising

India’s platform economy is driven by the desire to occupy, aggregate and
control informality and its communal life, by breaking it down to indi-
viduals that can be plotted within the formal domain of computational
capital. The two clinching revenue models of the platform economy in the
media industry are subscription or advertising based. In the case of the
former, captive, paying customers are allowed access to content exclusive
to the platform. In the latter case, the content is made accessible for free,
at the cost of hijacking consumer for advertising merchandize. While the
former is a relatively straightforward service to paying customers, the lat-
ter is a monopoly model where the user analytics becomes the product,
which is accumulated and sold to the advertisers, who then indulge in
targeted advertising (see Kumar 2018b). Targeted advertising is derived
from psychographic and demographic profiles append to the platform’s
‘knowledge’. In India, YouTube has become the pre-eminent advertising-­
based platform for vernacular media consumption within the online
sphere. As a content platform, the repository offered by YouTube is
unmatched. It is the pre-eminent platform to access all vernacular media
content in Bhojpuri, Haryanvi, Santhali, Uttarakhandi, Himachali and
other ‘dialects’ of Hindi, while also carrying most of the official Television
channels and copyrighted content. It also conveys the equivalent content
in the non-Hindi-speaking regions of India, as Srinivas notes in the con-
text of Telugu language content from South India:

YouTube’s status as the official repository of the local media industry has
come into sharp focus. Today, major Telugu language television news chan-
nels including TV9, TV5 and ABN Andhra Jyothi, beam live on YouTube.
All major Telugu television channels upload content on their official
YouTube channels. For their part, film production and packaged media
(VCD/DVD/Blu-ray) distribution companies have put out hundreds of
film titles on their YouTube channels. More recent titles are available in the
HD versions with English subtitles. Almost all Telugu YouTube content is
freely accessible from Indian IP addresses. (Srinivas 2017)

The multichannel network (MCN) architecture of YouTube has been

crucial to this sponge-like absorption of entire media spectrums across the
globe. Lobato explains the shift from singular videos to MCNs in
YouTube’s cultural-economic logic after the takeover by Google in 2006:
 13 INFORMALITY IN THE TIME OF PLATFORMIZATION 269

The early YouTube was characterized by the promise of direct, DIY com-
munication with a global audience, and its corporate image was that of the
upstart outsider. Today, YouTube is thoroughly mainstream. Its signature
innovations—revenue sharing of video advertising, automated content ID
and open viewer metrics—have become the basis for a massive commercial
ecosystem … Every surface of YouTube—display ads, overlays, comments,
pop-ups and not least the mise-en-scene of the videos—has been opened for
business in one way or another. This process has involved not only Google
but a wide range of other actors, including advertising agencies, data analyt-
ics firms, digital marketing companies and spambots, as well as hundreds of
thousands of non-professional producers … MCNs are intermediary firms
that operate in and around YouTube’s advertising infrastructure. A common
business model is for MCNs to sign up a large number of popular channels
to their network, then, using YouTube’s content management system, to
sell advertising and cross-promote their affiliated channels across this net-
work, while also working with popular YouTube celebrities to develop them
into fully fledged video brands … As well as having a commercial relation-
ship with YouTube, which works direct with popular creators via the Partner
programme, many YouTubers now sign contracts with MCNs to increase
their audience and advertising income and agree to split their ad revenue
with the MCN accordingly. (Lobato 2016, pp. 348–349)

While it may seem to be unchanged as a platform in terms of the screen

interface, the architectural and algorithmic shift in YouTube has made
fundamental changes on at least two accounts: (i) targeted advertising for
the absorption of ad revenue, and (ii) privileging copyrighted content for
monetization. Lobato observes that the MCNs ‘aggregate ad sales across
the platform, increase the quality of uploaded videos, reduce intellectual
property infringements and generally make it a more appealing space for
advertisers’ (Lobato 2016, p. 351). The MCNs, therefore, provide ‘non-­
professional creators with technical, promotional and advertising services
in exchange for a commission (20–50% of net advertising revenues)—a
classic intermediary function’ (ibid.). The algorithmic scalability and ad
placement offers a well-rounded platform ecosystem that helps content
creators garner attention in the YouTube ocean. MCNs, as a search opti-
mization service tailored for YouTube, provide ‘advice on titles, keywords
and metadata and to associate content with topical and frequently
searched-for terms’ (ibid., p. 356). However, they privilege specific con-
sumer ‘verticals’ such as fashion, cooking and tech review channels for
their cross-promotional potential and ‘their clear link to specific
270 A. KUMAR

advertising markets and demographics’ (ibid., p. 357). In an advertising-

based interlocking ecosystem, information markets, regulatory structures
and cultural dynamics appear to interpenetrate across digital media (mobile
and web-based applications) in a platform economy. One of the key ideas
here is to enable, shape and commodify new forms of sociability (see
Athique 2019).
In spite of the apparent promise of industry consolidation, content
aggregation and distribution of ad revenues, the absence of such con-
sumer verticals for vernacular media content, which is mainly addressed to
working-class migrants, complicates the picture significantly. The con-
sumer analytics on vernacular media content do not encourage greatly the
cross-promotional design of vertical integration and cross-promotion.
The intermediary function to aggregate the informal economy and include
it within the formal fold thus comes up against the limitations of
advertising-­driven media industries. One of the key roles of platformiza-
tion, after all, is aggregating people as analytics to be sold to advertisers.
Yet, the drive to vertically integrate, standardize and control the informal
economy also empowers those holding franchise relationships, even if the
dynamic is heavily weighted in favour of the franchisor (Vonderau 2016).
India’s informal video production, which earlier revolved around audio
cassettes or VCDs/DVDs, now primarily focuses on YouTube channels
(Wave Music, Angle Music and Ganga Cassettes being the prime aggrega-
tors) and the offline video sharing economy. Of course, the smaller MCNs
are rarely interested in setting up their own player platform, since it is
expensive to build and is entirely taken care of by YouTube. Questions of
exploitation and regulation are thus at the heart of the post-MCN
YouTube architecture.
It is important, however, to highlight key shifts that platformization via
YouTube has introduced within India’s vernacular media industries. First,
the MCNs work as portfolio economies, in which generic diversity of con-
tent becomes crucial as a risk mitigating tactic, even though the biggest
beneficiaries of aggregation remain the major film stars (Ascher 2016).
Cross-promotional interests and algorithmic recommendations ensure
that users navigate the channel portfolios in trajectories that best serve the
interests of YouTube. Second, MCN-led architecture does not only serve
its own enclosed interests, since it strategically outmanoeuvres the erst-
while singular video design. Instead of risking one’s creative work and
livelihood by dumping it in the YouTube ocean as a singular entity, artists
are compelled to enter a contractual arrangement with the aggregators,
 13 INFORMALITY IN THE TIME OF PLATFORMIZATION 271

while consumers are compelled to follow a new mode of guided consump-

tion. Without the navigation function of the channels, no video can thrive
in the ostensibly ‘free’ world of YouTube. Third, YouTube is at the heart
of the platformization of vernacular music economy in terms of distribu-
tion, and it unflinchingly privileges the formalization of the informal econ-
omy. Fourth, in terms of arbitrage, YouTube only sits beside the thriving
informal economy operating as a mode of public spectacle. Thus, while it
is undeniable that successive media technologies have aided the exponen-
tial rise of vernacular music, the centrality of live concerts has never con-
ceded pre-eminence to platformization. We must therefore keep the live
concerts in focus to understand the broader life of informality in the time
of platformization.

The Live Concerts

Informality is not a mere object of scholarly fetish in this discussion, but a
step outside the control exercised by the production-distribution struc-
ture. As most media production tends to be capital intensive, its produc-
tion costs and distribution infrastructure remain in the hands of small
cartels. The life of sub-regional media began as an initiative outside this
control of capital and distribution, when the likes of Manoj Tiwari who
sang in live concerts began to sell their often pirated cassettes to a mass
audience. Shall we simply concede that these spaces outside the formal
sector have come full circle be consumed by formalization via digital tech-
nology and web-based platforms? Not quite, because informality, not as a
simple economic, but as a performative temperament continues to define
vernacular media in general and Bhojpuri media in particular. The live
concerts, in spite of the newfound glitz and mounting political and reli-
gious patronage, recall and restore direct communication between artists
and their audience. It is this essential performative substance which por-
table media devices promise to capture as arbitrage platforms. That is why,
even as online views multiply relentlessly and offline data kiosks thrive, the
performative informality of the live concert continues to mobilize millions
across remote villages, small towns and big cities. The performative excess
triggers communitarian solidarities built around language affinities. The
visceral nature of live concerts which witness thousands congregate for a
nightlong feast of performative surplus are regularized encounters with
the vernacular ‘public’ spheres operating outside the formal straitjackets.
272 A. KUMAR

Most of these live concerts are advertised on account of a relatively

well-known singer-performer, but a whole bunch of younger singers,
dancers and anchors hold the crowd’s attention for the bulk of the event.
Patriotic, devotional and sleazy genres are blended together with a lot of
direct conversation between the anchors or singers on stage and the
crowds. Unlike Bollywood extravaganzas on ‘world tours’ where the stage
remediates the screen, the Bhojpuri live concerts are far more intimate and
receptive to the crowd’s mood. The life of informality in live concerts,
therefore, revolves around the fact that performers submit to the unpre-
dictability of popular vote. Instead of serving them a film or album prod-
uct, they orient themselves towards the service of popular demand. The
live concerts therefore invert the formal grid in which popular culture
operates as an industrial formation, and repeatedly underline the funda-
mental alterity of vernacular mediation. The live concert is also the kernel
of communal solidarity as the basis of vernacular media’s success. It is the
pre-eminent site where a plea is made by an artist to the people and his
candidature ratified for further outgrowth.
A whole range of hereditary genres and artists (such as Dhobi geet and
Ahirauwa naach), only perform in the neighbouring towns and villages.
Increasingly, though, the younger generation of performers do not wish
to confine themselves to hereditary genres. Unlike a few decades ago,
when expertise within a genre was the most desirable attribute, the perfor-
mative virtuosity to switch across genres and styles is increasingly the most
desirable component of informality that thrives in concert performances
(Kumar, Forthcoming). One of the key battlegrounds of such virtuosity is
the duel, where performers or their teams engage in a lively contest.
Prakash writes about the genre:

Dūgolā (singer-duels), also known as laykārı̄ muqābalā (lyrical rivalry) or

lokgı̄t muqābalā (‘folk’ song competition), is a popular performance of the
Magahi and Bhojpuri regions of north India, in which two or more singers-­
performers rival against each other. Like a standup comedian, the dūgolā
performer sings, dances, cracks jokes, tells stories and often composes new
song and stories impromptu during a performance. There are similar struc-
tures of performance across India with different names, such as kobigān in
Bengal, and ladāi, muqāblā, and akhārā in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya
Pradesh … Because of its competitive nature, dūgolā inherits strong ele-
ments of sports and play. In the last ten to fifteen years, there has been a
strong resurgence of this song performance tradition in the Bhojpuri and
 13 INFORMALITY IN THE TIME OF PLATFORMIZATION 273

Magahi regions of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, with the growing market of
Bhojpuri music and cinema industry … The performance gives space to new
singer-performers to emerge, as well as for older performers to return and
share years of acquired experience with the audience … Dūgolā performers
sing, dance, and freely draw from all possible sources. They often alter exist-
ing musical compositions and compose spontaneously to score points on the
rival group. Performer-singers often break into a quarrel, sing insult songs,
and demonstrate power and valour through masculine gestures.
(Prakash 2019)

Even though many of these dugola recordings are available on YouTube

and on DVDs with various vendors, the substance of performative virtuos-
ity in direct conversation with crowd is lost in those arbitrage platforms.
Yet, towards the end of the YouTube videos of these events, the flicker at
the bottom displays phone numbers to contact the production company
and artists for organizing live concerts. The patronage for such shows
could vary from private patrons at a village or town gathering to a more
political or religious patronage with multiple stakeholders. In that respect,
the live concerts stand not in opposition but adjacent to the affordances of
platformization and its attendant formalization of the media economy.
They recruit platforms as advertising agents, while continuing to sit beside,
fiddling with the unpredictable, ephemeral, ribaldrous and sovereign dec-
larations of popular will—widely available but not fully recoverable in the
platform economy. Therefore, the informality and unpredictability of the
live concerts, which constitute the kernel of both the economic and politi-
cal substance of vernacular media, challenge the structure of archival ten-
dencies of vernacular media. The archive, after all, determines the nature
of community formation and politics of accessing the common wealth (see
Kumar 2018a).

Three Ideas of the Archive

As discussed above, the shift from audio cassettes and VCDs/DVDs
towards mobile phones and microSD cards marked a shift from communal
viewing towards more individual consumption. Even if cassettes and discs
were individually owned, the devices on which they were played were often
collectively owned by the migrant workers in a shared accommodation.
Mobile phones, on the other hand, are largely personal devices. Even when
women or teenaged boys borrow the phones shared among family
274 A. KUMAR

members, or from their elder brothers, they very often use their own
microSD cards to personalize the device. Mukherjee and Singh offer some
insights:

Despite the ease and seamlessness in streaming music, the content remains
with the content providers, which is not the case with memory cards. People
have a personal attachment to their microSD cards; they keep them safe
from scratches, they love to talk about their content (unless some of it is
censored/pornographic), and, as such, it perpetuates a personal archiving
practice. These personal archiving practices are marked by variation in the
frequency of visits to the download vendor and a preference regarding the
type of uploading. (emphasis added). (Mukherjee and Singh 2017, p. 265)

However, more interesting hybrids such as Chinese-made DVD players

have emerged in the interstices between communal and individual modes
of media consumption. Mukherjee and Singh call them mobile media
assemblages, as they play videos not just from DVDs but also from
microSD cards, which means that ‘DVD players no longer just support
DVDs, and microSD cards do not remain exclusive to mobile phones and
their users. To make the microSD card compatible with new DVD players,
various cheap USB adaptors have flooded the local market’ (ibid., p. 266).
If we were to think of these practices in terms of their archival kernels, the
audio cassette, VCD/DVD or the microSD card all encourage individual/
private storage of an exclusive set of data while holding key interest in sites
of communal storage, whether it be a retail vendor or a download kiosk
with its laptops/desktops and their classified storage. The user, therefore,
maintains both personal as well as communal archives, knowing fully well
the vulnerabilities of breakdown with unreliable devices (see Larkin 2008).
Cassettes, discs or cards may get corrupted as easily as the players may stop
working. The first idea of the archive, therefore, is one where storage and
access to material always remains unreliable and site-specific. Even though
one approaches a shop as a buyer within the informal economy, the archive
is constituted by two unstable pieces—both struggling with the precarity
of livelihood and technology. The working-class settlements, precarious
wage labour employment, the mobile shops or download kiosks, the
‘makeshift’ devices, the illegal economy of downloads, the tricky format
conversions specific to mobile phones’ storage and player types constitute
a lifeworld of citizen-archive duality in which no bounding block appears
stable enough to hold its ground.
 13 INFORMALITY IN THE TIME OF PLATFORMIZATION 275

The second idea of the archive pertains to YouTube, which offers a

paradigm shift as long as the user has access to sufficient Internet band-
width. YouTube offers itself as an oceanic archive, which contains nearly
every vernacular music document produced. With increasing formaliza-
tion of the economy, video production companies are incentivized to
upload their entire portfolio so they can harvest user hits and monetise
them with ad revenues. In this ever-expanding archive, access remains
‘free’ as long as one concedes some attention to the advertisements and
navigation remains fluid, either via autoplay or on account of the rich
metadata. The remaining site of instability is Internet bandwidth. If one
wants to access the free archive, one must subscribe to Internet data packs
or plug into broadband connections. As it turns out, cheaper data packs
have indeed encouraged many more to stream videos instead of maintain-
ing personal storage and offline consumption. Yet, the battle over the pre-
vailing idea of archive continues. The nature of archive, it must not be
forgotten, indicates the character of citizenship rights. Formalization as a
drive cannot entirely continue without the formalization of labour laws,
fair wage employment, reliable working-class housing and social security.
YouTube’s effort to appropriate the informal economy within its formal
fold is thus challenged by the precarious conditions of production which
prevail, and of which vernacular music is an exemplar. Most of the time,
these ‘not-yet’ citizens cannot simply walk into a stable archive, in spite of
its pretensions of free and limitless access.
The third persistent idea of the archive at work, therefore, manifests the
life of informality in the time of platformization. The instability of shifting
arbitrage platforms, and unstable access to platform infrastructure, allevi-
ates any threat to the vitality of eclectic, informal, unpredictable and vis-
ceral performative virtuosity of live concerts. It is only popular memory, in
all its creative remembering quite unlike objective documentation, which
resembles the archive. Yet, it does not quite follow its structural and
bureaucratic regulatory principles. It may be a stretch to say that the
archive comes undone at the site which celebrates ephemerality, but the
live concert certainly offers the kernel of an informal lifeworld in which
‘unequal’ migrant working-class citizens claim temporary sovereignty as a
mass public. If the mainstream archive of academic history relies too heav-
ily on public institutions, the archive of popular culture traditionally
departs from the regimental control of statist narratives. In its departure,
however, the informal archive of popular culture remains ‘unreliable’, self-­
contradictory and often overdetermined. If one were to grip the archive of
276 A. KUMAR

vernacular popular culture via arbitrage platforms or the platform econ-

omy, one would be confronted by the increasingly assertive ‘regional’ or
‘provincial’ migrants, who seek a return to their cultural cache via copy-
righted or counterfeit media commodities. However, if one were to focus
on the live concerts as performative extravaganzas instead, one would be
confronted by the tendency to set the archive aside.
The performative spectacles of vernacular music are not so much the
site of consuming the musical composition as a product, but the pre-­
eminent site where the performative is placed in service to the popular will.
If the archive crystallizes the sedimentations of time, whether or not
arranged in neat classifications, the loud and full-frontal publicness of
Bhojpuri live concerts in particular defies both—the gradual layering of
time and the organization of generic clusters of cultural wealth. Yet, the
archival play at work in the live concerts entails the assertive publicness of
Bhojpuri language. After all, the step outside the legal economic strangle-
hold over media enabled by the trajectory of vernacular media, which I
have recounted, also endorsed a step outside the public shaming and sub-
version of vernacular languages. The third idea of the archive, then, per-
formatively confronts the normative assumption that Bhojpuri, among
other so-called dialects, belongs in private everyday realms. The archive is,
first and foremost, a public resource, even if accessing it entails certain
qualifications. What the assertive emergence of Bhojpuri and other ver-
nacular music cultures indicate, among other things, is the clinching con-
vergence of a two-faced arbitrage: (i) the translation of private reveries
into public assertions, and (ii) the takeover of women’s songs into a very
masculine assertion of scandalous publicness (Singh 2015). In this way,
the ‘hidden treasure’ of private archives is reclaimed for quasi-regionalist
assertions in the public realm, which is duly mounted by a variety of male
‘stars’ (Kumar 2016). While arbitrage platforms have enabled and sus-
tained the growth of this public assertion, and the platform economy
could stretch that support further, the individual or communal consump-
tion of vernacular media cannot possibly compensate for the spectacular
publicness of a Bhojpuri live concert.
The inclusion of the Bhojpuri archive within the platform economy
therefore marks the logic of overflow, instead of being the ultimate desti-
nation of the energies unleashed upon the stage. Even though we know
that Bhojpuri music is hardly a mere extension of folk songs, the back and
forth interpenetration between a media industry and the performative
directness of the live concert qualify and reframe the complicated life of
 13 INFORMALITY IN THE TIME OF PLATFORMIZATION 277

informality in the time of platformization. The archive of mobile media

assemblages, on the other hand, manifests across makeshift devices prone
to breakdown, dodgy bandwidths and corruptible files. Yet, the latter priv-
ileges direct ownership and access while the former breaks the wall in
between. Even if media transactions based on streaming or playing offer
access to audiovisual artefacts which appear to be tangible, they very often
reflect and store what is already lost, or on its way out. The performative
assertions of the live audience restore the present more than relaying the
past. Presence, in flesh and blood, cannot be captured in any substantial
sense on digital platforms.

Three Ideas of Informality

This chapter has discussed three primary ideas of informality. First, in
terms of legally valid transactions of authentic or counterfeit media com-
modities. Second, as the lifeblood of an event where the unpredictable and
rustic play on performative virtuosity. Third, as an everyday condition in
which work, life, livelihood and pleasure are collectively and communally
implicated together, to the extent that one appears to be suspended within
the crevices of formal-legal relations, not necessarily aware or concerned
about the imperatives of society or law. Arbitrage platforms emerged to
translate the third order of informality towards the first two. They were
variously supported by a moment of enthusiasm and opportunity for cre-
ative producers as well as distributors. Whether they sought a sale price or
rent on services, the arbitrage platforms helped unearth the everyday
archive of cultural wealth and set it in motion as objects and services in
economic circulation. This led to an unprecedented expansion of the pop-
ular archive with the interpenetration of new motifs, intersections and
ambitions. YouTube in particular has harvested this relentlessly growing
archive in exchange of freedom to access and stream the videos on per-
sonal devices. Thus, it would appear that the orders of informality could
finally be abandoned—with the producers given the incentive of ad reve-
nues and the viewers able to effortlessly stream content, thereby bringing
it all within the formal fold. If it were that easy, YouTube would become
the default popular archive for vernacular media, making other arbitrage
platforms redundant.
However, this chapter has also explored a fundamental tension between
the performative informality of live concerts and the distributive control
of platform economy. As we have recounted, while arbitrage platforms
278 A. KUMAR

offered a way to step outside the traditional media platforms, platform

economy does not take a similarly benign look at informality. The trajec-
tory of platformization is therefore also that of identifying new consumer
demographics, whose attention could be monetized in due time. The
monopolistic outreach of digital platforms is propelled by a relentless force
to dis-embed, aggregate and reorganize via algorithms a new formal order
of media consumption. While this certainly threatens the informal media
markets, they have thrived by maintaining a curious balance. The formal-
ization drive of the platform economy—so that capital flow and consumer
attention are controlled—can certainly sit beside, and feed off, the live
concert spectacle and its repeated affirmations of the popular mandate. It
can harvest ever more hits and correlate consumer analytics to be sold to
advertisers. But the assertive publicness of Bhojpuri popular culture, as
with other vernacular media, is testament to the desire to untether such
control over the popular archive. The mobile media assemblages or online
footprints of vernacular media only constitute the leftover traces of an
intensity, which earns its stripes by the virtue of various informalities.

Acknowledgement This chapter was published previously in Media Industries

Journal, 6(2), 2019.

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 CHAPTER 14

Notes on the Platformization of Mainstream

Hinduism

Pradip Thomas

This chapter explores the platformization of religion in India and, in par-

ticular, the predominant religion in India, Hinduism. To begin with, I
would also like to add that my thoughts on this subject are to some extent
provisional, given that religion and religiosity online are constantly being
reshaped by technological change as well as by economic and political
imperatives. In this chapter, I attempt to deal primarily with issues related
to platforms that are dedicated to the provision of various services to
everyday religion, and only secondarily with mega-platforms, such as
Facebook, which are home to literally thousands of religious socialities.
Nonetheless, in both cases, the mining and repurposing of these socialities
by political parties and quasi-political (and sometimes extreme right)
Hindu organizations towards partisan ends has become a point of conten-
tion in India, as it has with other faiths in other parts of the world. From
an academic point of view, the relationship between online communica-
tion and religious nationalism has been the basis for a number of writings,

P. Thomas (*)
University of Queensland, St Lucia, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 281

A. Athique, V. Parthasarathi (eds.), Platform Capitalism in India,
Global Transformations in Media and Communication Research - A
Palgrave and IAMCR Series,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44563-8_14
282 P. THOMAS

including by Sahana Udupa and others (Bhushan 2015; Chaturvedi 2016;

Kallen 1998; Udupa 2015). This chapter takes its topical focus from the
role played by platforms in creating opportunities for various commodifi-
cations of Hinduism. At the same time, this chapter also makes the argu-
ment that equivalences between commodifications in and of Hinduism
and other religions such as Christianity need to be eschewed in favour of
a broader understanding of the specificities of mediated religious experi-
ences and the ‘apprehending’ of the divine, which varies from one religion
to another.

The Monetization of Religious ‘Affect’ in India

There is, of course, no questioning the fact that online transactions in the
context of religion have increased tremendously in recent years, and that
there has been a substantial and significant increase in the monetization of
these transactions. In the context of Hinduism, that the majority of reli-
gious platforms and apps are, for the most part, catering primarily to the
everyday devotional needs of local and diasporic Hindus, thereby extend-
ing efficiencies in the delivery of religious goods and services. At the same
time, their situation in the context of the World Wide Web inevitably facil-
itates an increasingly virtual appreciation and experience of localized wor-
ship. Beyond supplying the material goods for pujas, platforms such as
AadiShakti offer over 150 spiritual services to clients, including “astrology,
face reading, palm reading, reflexology, Vaastu, yoga, reiki, past life regres-
sion, acupuncture, naturopathy, fengshui consulting, aromatherapy, crys-
tal healing, Chinese astrology, numerology etc.” (see Sharma 2016). In
other words, these platforms are, in the main, product, counselling and
prediction services, although they also include ritual and travel-related pil-
grimage services.
Since India is a land of many ‘living’ religions, the fact that online trans-
actions of religious goods and services have become monetized should not
come as any surprise. However, this market and the transactional econo-
mies linked to these markets are also being shaped by the wider political
project of ‘making India Hindu’, and this pan-Indian project has provided
many opportunities, both offline and online, to further a nationalistic and
‘affective’ embrace of Hindu institutions, cultures and ideologies. This
wider political reality was highlighted by the acceleration of obvious cor-
respondences between political, cultural and material Hinduism during
the 2019 national elections in India. The ‘celebritization’ of the BJP’s
 14 NOTES ON THE PLATFORMIZATION OF MAINSTREAM HINDUISM 283

distinct version of Hinduism, legacy media’s broad capitulation to a

majoritarian agenda, numerous Bollywood stars’ endorsements of this
agenda and its reinforcement by a sophisticated machinery of trolls, bots,
clickbaits and keyboard warriors aligned to the political cause of greater
Hinduism all point to ongoing investments being made in the manufac-
ture of religious nationalism as a means of shaping and harvesting alle-
giances. This agenda inevitably inflects many ‘ancillary’ religious industries,
in particular, yoga, health and well-being initiatives and religious con-
sumer products ranging from health foods to Ayurvedic toothpaste.
Tradition and the traditional, and its real and imagined correspondences
with all that is ‘pure and unsullied’, have become widely monetized and
are today the basis for multi-million industries, such as Baba Ramdev’s
Patanjali brand that claims to have incorporated Ayurveda (India’s
ancient medical texts and practices) into all its product lines from tooth-
paste to biscuits.
This market of sanctified consumer goods has also provided religious
institutions and other purveyors of religion with new sources of income.
Temple towns all over India are now heavily marketed online, not merely
for the temple experience itself, but also for the ancillary services to be
found in that town, ranging from ayurvedic massages to yoga classes and
fortune telling. Many traditional ritual experts (or Pujaris) have exited
within the precariat of modern India, before being ‘saved’ by the new
opportunities offered by platform religion. Platforms, in this sense are
playing an important role in reviving religious services and sites in a coun-
try where ownership of mobile devices and internet access is expanding
exponentially. In the process, they are globalizing their material particu-
larities and enabling a vast number of sacred sites to become part of the
growing footprint of the religious tourism industry. While this phenome-
non is most evident in the domain of Hinduism, there have also been
smaller investments in Christian and Muslim religious tourism circuits,
and the Buddhist circuit (which caters to predominantly international visi-
tors and devotees) has also seen major investments in online promotion
along with infrastructure projects in towns that have a connection with
Buddha, such as Bodhgaya, Nalanda, Rajgir, Kushinagar, Sarnath, Sanchi,
Ajanta Caves, Dhauli and Dharamshala (Intenrational Finance
Corporation 2018).
It is clear that all the major and minor religions in India now have an
online presence and there is increasing evidence that quite a substantial
percentage of mobile downloads are linked to religious apps of one type
284 P. THOMAS

or the other. This does not arguably come as a surprise given the space and
place of religion in the everyday lives of Indians. In this sense the plat-
formization of religion can be considered rather banal, given that arguably
this is the latest iteration of religious mediation that has perhaps always
been of a transactional kind. Platforms are just the latest in-between that
is enabling such transactions. Faith has from time immemorial been medi-
ated and the advent of technology and in particular online technologies
has enabled multiple mediation. With mobile devices in particular and
their imbrications in everyday life, embedded and embodied, this integra-
tion between technology and the religious experience has become more
pronounced. One arguably egalitarian consequence of religious and plat-
forms and apps is that they have the potential to democratize access to
temples and deities for individuals and communities who have tradition-
ally been denied such access, such as Dalits and lower caste Hindus.
However, there is scant data available that demonstrates this effect. Given
the sharpening of caste cleavages in the era of Hindutva, it is more than
likely that online Hindu sacred space will reflect offline realities.

The Sacred Gaze, Hindu Space and Cyberspace

Before exploring the platformization of Hinduism further, I would like to
deal with two important aspects of the relationship between platforms and
religion. My concerns, broadly, relate to: (1) the established nature of
‘material religion’ and (2) the belief in ‘non-physical sacred spaces’. Not
all religions organize the material and metaphysical in the same ways.
Consequently, there are underlying theological reasons why are repre-
sented/integrated differently in their manifestation within platforms, and
it is also clear that not all religions have embraced platforms in their
entirety. The obvious question, then, is what is it that has made Hinduism
especially conducive to the success of religious platforms and platform
religiosities? What strikes me as a fascinating aspect of Hinduism, is Hindu
belief in the immanence of God within Hindu products, goods and ser-
vices—a mercantile boon to the marketplaces of Hinduism market, but
also a fundamental and distinctive belief that suggests the key relevance of
ritual as orthopraxy (correct practice) to any understanding of Hinduism
offline and that of omnipraxy (DIY practices) online. The acceptance of
DIY practices signifies a flexibility that has contributed to the success of
online Hinduism. Having said that, it is important that we acknowledge
that the privatization of control over religious ritual online is by no means
 14 NOTES ON THE PLATFORMIZATION OF MAINSTREAM HINDUISM 285

absolute and that major investments have been made by the religious sta-
tus quo to bring online worship in line with their offline versions.
For the colonial onlookers during the era of Empire, everyday Hinduism
appeared to consist primarily of idolatory and superstition, inspiring a key
objective of the colonial missionary to counter the hegemonic influence of
the Brahmanic order that presided over an amorphous Hinduism and
replace it with the rational, text-based Christianity, and its potential to
suture the rational ‘wholesomeness’ of the text-belief-experience triage.
There were, of course, many colonial residents and visitors who did come
to better understand the philosophical foundations of Hinduism and many
more who became enamoured precisely with its material practices.
Nonetheless, it remains significant that the colonial encounter juxtaposed
India’s ritual practices with a European culture that had substantially (and
violently) truncated its own historical ritual practices in favour of an aus-
tere textual practice. Thus, until recently, material religion has only been
sparingly associated with the Judaic religions that emphasize the primacy
of the ‘text’ as mediator. Subsequent studies on the Orthodox and Roman
Catholic traditions as well as Protestantism (in many ways being, alongside
Islam, the bastion of the text) have begun to address its inherent material-
ism. The Eucharist, for example, is resolutely based on belief in the trans-
formative potential of ‘things’ as is the role played by icons and images in
the Orthodox and Roman Catholic traditions. With neo-Pentecostalism
there is an overwhelming celebration of prosperity and of all material
things associated with prosperity. In fact, in this tradition, the materiality
of things and platforms are closely entwined since all technologies can be
used for Godly purposes to further the ‘Great Commission’ and spread
the Word of God.
Colonial scholars of Hinduism of course typically missed these points of
comparison, because everyday Hinduism seemingly had little to do with a
sacred text, but everything to do with innumerable rituals in which ‘things’
play the central role. As Diana Eck (1980, p. 3), describes it: “in the Hindu
understanding, the deity is present in the image, the visual apprehension
of the image is charged with religious meaning. Beholding the image is an
act of worship, and through the eyes one gains the blessing of the divine”.
In other words, the ‘sacred gaze’ is all important to Hinduism. Arguably,
that familiarity with the visual practice of seeing the deity in the image
offline (in devotional calendars, for example) enables, online images of
deities’ immaterial authenticity, even if religious platforms and apps are
clearly mediating such authenticities in unfamiliar ways. The expert on the
286 P. THOMAS

role of images in religion, David Morgan describes it thus “The acts of

looking at images and evoking imagery within the imagination are ritual
practices that would not work as they do without imagery. Contemplation
and devotion are only two aspects of many different visual practices.
Spectacle, display, procession, teaching, and commemoration also serve
religious ends … seeing is intermingled with other forms of activity such
as reading, meditating, suffering, eating, dreaming, singing and praying”
(2005, pp. 51–52). It is immediately obvious that all of these practices can
be mediated by electronic means. In the context of Hinduism, the iconic
power of the image is such that faith and its authenticity as mediated by
online visualization has never been seriously doubted. Furthermore, the
incorporation of commercial instincts and practices within everyday mate-
rial renditions of Hinduism appear to readily allow for monetization by
platforms through diverse transactionalities that traverse the material and
spiritual needs of worshippers.
Vineetha Sinha’s Religion and Commodification, explores the flows of
religious material between the local and the global of “how these ‘puja
things’ as commodities traverse various routes and circulate within net-
works created across transnational boundaries” (2011). Sinha explores
how fresh flowers, prayer alters and visual representations are part of
“business practices and marketing strategies” that “ connect groups of
makers, seller and buyers into a much wider network” and of how “local
business are plugged into a global network” that operates between Tamil
Nadu, India and Southeast Asian countries, inclusive of Singapore,
Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand. Sinha also explores various ways in
which religious commodities are activated as religious objects and the
complex nature of the ways in which such items flow through profane-­
sacred-­profane cycles. In the context of Hindu nationalism, an interesting
avenue for research will be to understand how global cultural flows of such
products and their consumption have become ‘charged’ as it were with
extra-religious ‘Bhakti’ for the faithful, diaspora Hindu who is keenly
implicated in the project of Hindutva. Nonetheless, it is important to bal-
ance this very modern political drive for orthodoxy with the historical
reality that Hinduism has always been a de-centralised religion, where
there is no single ‘authority’ on matters of devotion. Within a multitude
of interpretations and doctrines, there always scope to destabilise attempts
and religious hegemony and ‘authoritative’ practice. As the historian
 14 NOTES ON THE PLATFORMIZATION OF MAINSTREAM HINDUISM 287

Vinay Lal puts it: “Only Hinduism can match the internet’s playfulness:
the religion’s proverbial ‘330 million’ gods and goddesses, a testimony to
the intrinsically decentred and polyphonic nature of the faith, find corre-
spondence in the world-wide web’s billion points of origin, intersection,
and dispersal” (2013).
Another point of convergence with the digital and another reason,
arguably, for the efflorescence of online Hinduism is widespread belief in
“non-physical sacred spaces” and places that are ‘charged’, as it were, with
spiritual power. Scheifinger has argued, “If Hinduism accepts a non-phys-
ical space which is conceived of in spiritual terms then there is no reason
why the non-physical cyberspace cannot also be recognised” (2008,
p. 236). There is, in other words, no necessary ‘virtualization’ or dilution
of the religious experience online, since this is just another window to the
experiencing of the ineffable. As Scheifinger has argued in an article on
‘The Jaganath Temple and Online Darshan’, the administration of this
famous temple in Eastern India have fully embraced the need for the tem-
ple’s presence to be mediated online and that, contrary to the theorists of
globalization, the ‘disembedding’ of the temple deity has not occurred
because of its expanded presence online (2009). Thus, as Scheifinger
notes: “An investigation of the availability of Jagannath’s darshan online
leads me to believe that the local site does not necessarily decline in impor-
tance. Jagannath does not become disembedded from the temple in Puri.
Instead, as a result of Jagannath’s appearance online, there is interplay
between the global and the local” (2009, p. 279). By contrast, Meera
Nanda’s The God Market deals with the ways in which globalization does
appear to have extended what she terms the ‘rush hour of the Gods’ under
the aegis of the state-temple-corporate complex in India—what one might
call a structural commodification of material Hinduism against the back-
drop of the mainstream of Hindu nationalism (2009). Nanda’s study
explores the ‘re-ritualizations’ of the Great Tradition, the reinventions of
popular Hinduism and the increasing use of education and tourism as
means to reinforce an all-India project of Vedic Hinduism, at the expense
of more variable and localized Hindu traditions. One of the obvious chal-
lenges, then, in interpreting the remediation of Hindu religious practices
via the digital screen is that our fundamental understanding of material
Hinduism inevitably remains both diverse and contentious.
288 P. THOMAS

Platforms, Markets and Experiences

Having noted the unresolved status of the material religious practices now
being ‘remediated’ for the digital age, I will shift to a more empirical
account of religion’s platform economy. There is now a burgeoning range
of platforms and apps dedicated to the expanding business of online
Hinduism. These range from apps that facilitate pujas in real time from a
diaspora Indian’s favourite temple in India (Puja: Mobile temple puja for
Indian Hindu Gods, 27 Mantraa), apps that are dedicated to astrology
and horoscopes (Astrotalk), that link ritual specialists to ordinary Hindus
(ePuja & Shubhpuja), that offer devotional songs (2b Radio Bhakti), facil-
itate the download of religious ‘wallpaper’ for device screens (Hindu God
HD Wallpaper), that support religious tourism, including travel (Kaawad
Yatra Travel app), accommodation and access to temples and one stop
sites such the House of God owned by the Times of India group (the largest
media group in India) that offers access to rituals and to the religious
experience from more than a hundred temples, forty-seven gurus, numer-
ous Gods, along with a variety of other ancillary goods and services. The
acquisition of House of God in 2017 added to the existing Times of India
site SpeakingTree.in which specializes in spiritual wellness techniques and
connecting seekers to online mendicants. It has become obvious that the
big corporate houses in India now recognize growing business opportuni-
ties in this sector. The ex-CEO of Cognizant, Lakshmi Narayan, has, for
example, invested in “Harivara, which has done more than 33,000 pujas
and has a network of 3,200 priests …. Harivara gives priests a free mobile
phone and insurance” and loans when needed (Ayyar 2017).
Ajay Mehta’s first-hand account reproduced in the New York Times of
taking part in a remotely organized Puja organized by the religious plat-
form Shubhpuja highlights both its efficiency and inefficiencies (Skype
contact was erratic) but also how an ‘authentic’ experience online can be
left to the religious experts and platform owners who have made business
opportunities in a market that is recession-proof (2015). To Mehta, this
experience was fundamentally about ease and efficiency, that is, the avail-
ability of a service, in clear contrast with the caste- and class-based inequal-
ities highlighted by the VIP lanes outside temples in India:

After about an hour, Acharya Keshav told me I could sign off. As a nice
Shubhpuja convenience, the acharyas would continue the next hour of the
puja without me having to be present through Skype. I’d gotten my own
 14 NOTES ON THE PLATFORMIZATION OF MAINSTREAM HINDUISM 289

prayer ceremony without needing to do much more than press a button and
fill out a form—basically Uber, but for god. (Mehta 2015)

The authenticity of this mediated ritual was simply not in question (as
is often the case when Christian rituals mediated online are discussed).
Madhavi Mallapragada similarly describes online darshan as an example of
remediation in which

new media involve the repurposing of older media and … how the latter is
refashioned to adapt to the new media environment … Digital darshan fore-
grounds the remediation of ‘digital’ as analog media forms such as
­photographs, iconic calendar art and books reconfigured as digital bits …
Correspondingly, ‘old media’ imagery is purposefully used to sacralize ‘new’
digital representation. (Mallapragada 2010, pp. 114–115)

While it is certainly the case that religious platforms have enabled the
remote experience of rituals via Skype, to me, the most intriguing aspect
of this interface is not the enabling app or platform per se. but rather the
fundamental opportunities that have arisen (and are being taken up) to
materialize and re-materialize religion and expand and extend its com-
modification. In line with Campbell et al.’s study of religious apps, it
would seem that such in apps in India can be broadly classified under
“apps oriented around religious practice and apps embedded with reli-
gious content” (2014, p. 164). The $30–40 billion religious market in
India has grown exponentially over the last decade largely due to a growth
in an array of online services, including religious apps catering to the daily
religious needs of devotees across the major faiths in India, specific reli-
gious services such as Shubhpuja that offers bespoke solutions to Hindu
communities in India and the diaspora, ePuja and Online Prasad (con-
nected to fifty temples in India and that also sells a religious brand of
rudraksha, Zevotion) and that cater to the needs of diaspora Hindu com-
munities, online religious markets such as Shubhkart, which is essentially a
religious version of Flipkart or Amazon that includes fifteen categories of
devotional products, ranging from Patanjali Aastha and gold and silver
products, puja items, idols, kamdhenu cows, Vastu and gemstones, and the
more ecumenical Puja Shoppe, which also offers pandit services and pujas
to win court battles and prevent accidents, online marketing portals that
also sell religious paraphernalia such as shopclues.com, snapdeal.com, travel
portals such as MyHolyTrip, which caters to the growing market for
290 P. THOMAS

religious tourism, and specialist sites that cater for the Hajj market such as
Proud Ummah, along with agencies such as Wave Hair involved in the sale
of secondary products such as hair extensions sourced from key temples in
India. ShubhKart is owned by the Pittie group of companies, also involved
in real estate, well-being and entertainment and a supplier of products that
are available through Reliance Retail stores throughout India.
It would seem that there has been a constellation of very contemporary
factors that have contributed to the expansion the online religious market
in India. Apart from the fact that Hinduism’s diversity and its space and
place agnosticism has helped with a more or less seamless fit with plat-
forms and apps, there is also the overt market orientation of ‘soft’ religious
fundamentalism that aligns with the broader doctrines of economic neo-­
liberalism. A range of manufactured fears and Hindu-nationalist aspira-
tions—the dilution of Hinduism, the need to have faith in ‘swadeshi’,
Made in India products, the purity of Indian products as opposed to those
manufactured by foreign MNCs, the need to make India great again, the
need to foreground India’s religious/scientific heritage have each contrib-
uted to connectivity’s and socialities online. The Supreme Court ruling
that reinforced the right to use the pictures of gods and goddesses for
commercial products have contributed to marketing opportunities within
the God market in particular that linked to religious institutions and to the
free-ranging God men and women who offer a range of religious services
for adherents across rural and urban India (Press Trust of India 2015).
These include Rajneesh’s ‘Osho’ brand of ashrams and products, Sri Sri
Ravi Shankar’s Art of Living programmes and products and Baba Gurmeet
Ram Rahim Singh Insan’s natural, organic product range of over 150
products (also sold in 200 stores and market complexes across North
India). The success of Baba Ramdev’s Patanjali in the food and beverages
market is apparently worth $1.6 billion, which does suggest that the
‘ayurvedic’ moment, along with the tropes of quality, purity and swadeshi
have become an established frame for the everyday valuation of consumer
products. Ramdev’s recent launch of the messenger service Kimbho (a
communication app designed to compete against WhatsApp) along with
his own branded SIM card and stated plans to compete with McDonalds
provides a broader reflection of a growing and loyal consumer base that
will avail of services that are branded as trustworthy, authentic and ‘indig-
enous’ on the purported basis that its very modern products are grounded
in tradition.
 14 NOTES ON THE PLATFORMIZATION OF MAINSTREAM HINDUISM 291

Thus, what we are seeing in India is the platformization of religious

belonging as a privileged mode of sociality and connectivity on the one
hand, and the establishment of religious tropes as the basis for massive
exercises in consumer marketing on the other. This wider platformization,
beyond the material needs of established religious practices, has been
enabled by the pre-existing religious media ecosystem. Whilst all of India’s
major religions operate in this place, we also need to recognize the fact
that the majority Hindu spectrum of this ecosystem has been perceptibly
fashioned by the explicit and implicit politics of Hindutva. In Ramdev’s
case, platforms ventures are underpinned by religious cable television sta-
tion (Aastha), his own celebrity marketing (including a TV serial shown
on Discovery India on his life and work—Swami Ramdev Ek Sangharsh),
a global fan base, a yoga empire, a large, national consumer goods busi-
ness and a wealth of both advertiser- and consumer-based revenues. This
is the Ramdev marketplace, an ecosystem that enables ambitious projects
such as the Kimbho platform. While Kimbho has had some teething prob-
lems, including security-related issues, it is to be expected that this plat-
form will enable a sociality, connectivity and interactivity that is shaped by
intimate knowledge of Ramdev’s religious constituency, translated in
transactional terms into knowledge of their consumer behaviour, spiritual
expectations and material needs. The development of Kimbho also aligns
with the government’s Digital India programme, being based on an argu-
ment that Indian programmers who have helped develop the world’s
major social media should now contribute to the development of ‘national’
platforms. Arguably, understanding Kimbho as a techno-cultural construct
and its consequences for forms of religious sociality is as important as
understanding it as a socioeconomic structure (Van Dijk 2013).

Patanjalinet, Shubhpuja and Business Based

on Religious Common Sense

I would like to illustrate the socialities of the God market by focusing on

two websites—Patanjali.net, which provides a shopping and consumer
experience based on common-sense tradition, and the Shubhpuja, which
caters explicitly to the puja and ritual needs of Hindu devotees online. The
Patanjaliayurved.net online store offers products across the Patanjali con-
sumer line, including hair products, personal products, Ayurvedic medi-
cine, herbal solutions, along with a range of natural food and home care
292 P. THOMAS

products. The text accompanying these products affirm ‘purity’ as the dis-
tinguishing feature of the Patanjali range, the naturalness and veracity of
the ingredients, some that are ostensibly sourced from rare herbs culti-
vated in their own farms and production processes that not only follow the
highest manufacturing standards but are in sync with the requirements of
cultural tradition. Patanjali products tap into the ‘common sense’ of con-
sumerism in present day India where there are real issues related to the
‘impurity’ and compromised nature of fast-moving consumer (FMCG)
goods, a concern that has been exploited by Patanjali’s marketing team.
The nationalism-inspired climate for Made in India goods and services has
certainly helped the Patanjali brand since it is seen to offer alternatives to,
foreign-owned, MNC-linked products. Additionally, the major invest-
ments being made in the reinventions of tradition and the validations of
the Vedic sciences have resulted in an environment in which tradition
increasingly is becoming an importantly player in determining both long-
term and every day consumer choices. Their website on the merits of
Ayurveda suggests the Ayurvedic alternative to allopathic medicine:
“Ayurveda has eight approaches to analyse ailment, called Nadi, Mootra,
Mala, Jihva, Shabda, Sparsha, Druk, and Aakruti. It helps us to maintain
the balance of vaak, pitta and kapha in the body …. So, why would anyone
visit a doctor that frequent and pop in the not so needed medicines when
Ayurveda comes in handy?!”(Patanjali Ayurved 2018). Clifford Geertz’s
(1993, p. 84) volume Local Knowledge includes a chapter on ‘Common
Sense as a Cultural System’. Common-sense fundamentally is based on
people implicitly believing in the value, validity and explanatory power of
cultural systems of sense making that provide the means to apprehend and
neutralize the bad forces and harmonize the good in individual control
over life’s major and minor problems, from health to success in love.
Geertz has suggested that the tonalities of common sense include the fol-
lowing: Its naturalness, practicalness, thinness, immethodicalness and
accessableness (Geertz 1993). Patanjali products make for common-sense,
value-based consumption based on Tradition since a majority of Indians
believe in the efficacies of traditional medicine although, and in contrast
with Geertz’s belief in the immethodicalness of common sense, Patanjali
has invested in the validation of the Vedic sciences and its ‘scientific
method’ by placing it on a par with products and processes associated with
Western science. Tapping into common sense while validating its products
as ‘scientific’ positions Patanjali products within an environment that is
 14 NOTES ON THE PLATFORMIZATION OF MAINSTREAM HINDUISM 293

supportive of Hinduism not merely as a religion but that is based on sci-

ence, rationality and common sense.
This correspondence between science and tradition, or science as tradi-
tion is illustrated by the Shubhpuja website that makes this correspon-
dence crystal clear. “Shubhpuja.com is a science and technology-based
platform for authentic Vedic pujas, astrology, Vastu and spiritual products
through educated and qualified professionals”. “We believe in upholding
our Vedas by catering to the customized needs of our clients … We are
scientifically revolutionizing the ancient spiritual practices by preserving
our customs and traditions that has been “Awarded equity-free seed fund
by Department of Science and Technology, Government of India at
Bombay Stock Exchange” (Shubhpuja 2018a). Covering pujas, pujas for
problems, astrology, Vastu and products, including idols, gemstones,
rudrakshas (prayer beads) and so on, the site offers an entirely alternative
universe of practices linked to individual-cosmic reconciliations on issues
related to health, business success, marriage that can all be dealt with by
investments in the correct rituals. For example, the first item in the scroll
down under pujas for problems is ‘Black magic related’. There are four
items listed black magic, evil eye, possessed by spirits and vashikaran (neg-
ativity), and the pujas are meant to bring about planetary alignment and,
thus, harmony in the lives of individuals. The pujas are expensive—rang-
ing from Rs. 10,000–15,000, and the priestly class remain prominent in
overseeing these rituals: “We will send you a qualified Indian Brahman
trained in Hindu Shastras to conduct puja at Devotees preferred location
(home, office etc.) and time (or muhurat time suggested by Shubhpuja)”—
thus suggesting that the ‘disintermediation’ of Brahmans as ritual experts
online has not occurred to the extent that it has in Islam and Christianity
where Mullahs and priests, to some extent, compete with online experts.
Among the many spiritual products for sale, there are six different vari-
eties of rudrakshas that are described as ‘tears of Shiva’, very much like the
anointed products sold by Christian televangelists. However, the rudrak-
shas are graded and the prices depend on their potency to achieve benefits
to the wearer. The benefits of wearing a 1 MukhiRudraksha include the
following:

• The wearer enjoys all the Worldly Comforts and all his material
desires get fulfilled yet he is not bound by them.
• Attainment of very high level of Spiritual Consciousness and Mental
Peace, Attainment of Nirvana.
294 P. THOMAS

• One Mukhi Rudraksha pacifies the malefic effects of planet SUN and
makes the individual charismatic and radiant like the Divine Surya.
• As per Ancient Vedic Texts, this Rudraksha is said to be very benefi-
cial in curing Headache, Right Eye problems & diseases of Liver,
Bowels, Heart Diseases, Bone Pains etc.
• This Rudraksha renders a person the power to Concentrate, Increased
Confidence, Leadership qualities and Prosperity.
• A person wearing One Mukhi Rudraksha is able to lead a Healthier,
Wealthier and Happier Life by the blessings of Lord Shiva.
(Shubhpuja 2018b)

While rudrakshas have been used as an aid to prayer in a variety of reli-

gious traditions, organizations like Shubhpuja have used the tropes of
purity, the authentic incantation of mantras, its consecrated nature and
immanence to validate their rudrarakshas as the most authentic and pow-
erful. There is however the need to locate such religious products within
a rudraksha economy based on buyers and sellers, ritual specialists, rudrak-
sha experts within the larger, Hindu economy. Arguably, these specialist
puja and product websites are involved in the competitive marketing of
this product particularly aimed primarily at diaspora Hindus who are com-
fortable with personalized forms of religious piety that involve engage-
ments with religious commodities from rudhrakshas to idols of favourite
Gods. In this sense, religious platforms such as Shubhpuja are like any
other retail platform except that their primary products are of a religious
kind. Pattana Kitsiara’s (2010) study of the commodification of an amulet
in Thailand in the 1980s as an example of commodity fetishism, highlights
the roles played by men in authority to invest a new holy pillar shrine with
power and invest an amulet with appropriate power to ward off the evil
eye. Linked to the deities Chatukham Rammathep and a pillar consecrated
by the Wat Mahathat Maha Worawihan, Nakhon Si Thammarat, eighty
million units of this amulet were manufactured and sold. Kitisara using
Marxian logics has argued that “…commodity is a key factor organizing
the social life in the capitalist society. People’ s social relation is determined
by market mechanism through dominant means of exchange such as
money and commodities. However, the amulet, as an inanimate object
worshipped for its supposed magical powers, assumes its fetish form
through both religio-cultural processes and market economy institutions”
(Kitsiara 2010, pp. 577–578).
 14 NOTES ON THE PLATFORMIZATION OF MAINSTREAM HINDUISM 295

I have tried to illustrate the fact that the religious platform economy in
India rides on the common sense of Ayurveda and the Vedic sciences
although this is backed up by major economic institutions and validated
by the State. While it is the case that religious platforms and apps in India
are an emerging sector with little evidence of market domination or verti-
cal integration as of yet, the rewards stemming from the platformization
of religion are only now being recognized by the corporate sector. Apart
from the Times of India group and its major investments in digital prod-
ucts and platforms through Times Internet, Shemaroo Entertainment
Ltd., which is a large provider of content for television and online services,
owns 2500 hours of multi-faith content and that launched three religious
apps in 2018—HariOm, Bhakti and Ibaadat (Press Trust of India 2018)
and Baba Ramdev, there have not been major investments from estab-
lished corporate houses and this has enabled a number of start-ups to
explore a range of religious services. While it is certainly the case that the
established players will use their market share and ownership of multiple
platforms to exploit what Mark Andrejevic has described as ‘affective eco-
nomics’, which is ‘a means of thinking about the commercial logic of cus-
tomization in which marketers seek to manage consumers not only via the
collection of demographic and behavioural information, but also by tap-
ping into a dominant feeling-tone or “sentiment”, and selling this on to
advertisers for targeted advertising’ (2011, p. 606). It would seem the
case, that at least for the moment, that for many of the smaller players,
primary incomes are tied to selling products rather than from advertising.

Platform Hinduism: Some Lines for Enquiry

Although, for the most part religious platforms in India cater to the diver-
sity of Hindu practices and the everyday needs of the faithful, they can also
be used to mobilize around specific politics, as the platform distribution of
posts on lynchings by ‘gaurakshaks’ (cow protectors) and mobilizations by
the Hindu right reveal, The linkages between the platformization of reli-
gion and viral politics and actions remains a grey area and more research is
required to understand the ‘crossover’ effects between the two. There are
already dedicated apps available from explicitly Hindu nationalist groups,
such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal, although argu-
ably the bulk of online incitement is found on ‘mainstream’ social media
such as Facebook, Instagram and, notoriously, on the Facebook-owned
cellular messenging service WhatsApp. WhatsApp has 250 million users in
296 P. THOMAS

India, making it a vital market for the global ambitions of the platform and
the default interpersonal communication mode for much of India). This is
by no means a fringe practice. During the 2017 elections in Uttar Pradesh,
India’s most populous and political bell-weather state, 6000 WhatsApp
groups were created by the ruling BJP for targeted messaging to their fol-
lowers. Arguably, this is where the platformization of religion becomes the
most problematic, appearing to converge readily with populist politics and
communal tensions. Given the targeted circulations of WhatsApp groups,
these are also prolific channels for ‘fake news’ aimed at nurturing explicitly
anti-secular religious socialities. There are also specific platforms that
counter the hegemony of Hindutva, including a very specific Dalit pres-
ence on platforms, although it is unclear as to the extent to which these
sites offer clearly alternatives modes of platform Hinduism or whether
they make a difference during electoral cycles. Vindu Goel in an article in
the New York Times, describes the ease with which WhatsApp groups can
be formed and their potential to act as a conduit for fundamentalist
content:

WhatsApp has several features that make it a potential tinderbox for misin-
formation and misuse. Users can remain anonymous, identified only by a
phone number. Groups, which are capped at 256 members, are easy to set
up by adding the phone numbers of contacts. People tend to belong to
multiple groups, so they often get exposed to the same messages repeatedly.
When messages are forwarded, there is no hint of where they originated.
And everything is encrypted, making it impossible for law enforcement offi-
cials or even WhatsApp to view what’s being said without looking at the
phone’s screen. (Goel 2018)

Although the Indian authorities have made efforts to monitor and con-
tain violence and unrest spreading through the platform media, there are
others such as the chief minister of Tripura, Biplab Kumar Deb, who uses
these very platforms to peddle outlandish claims to the faithful, including
his claim that the internet was an Indian invention perfected by ancient
kings to get battle updates during the era of the Mahabharata! One of the
issues that can be explored in the study of religious platforms is whether
the profusion of online religious experiences, socialities and interventions
have begun to irrevocably shape the fabric of Hindu religiosity in India or
whether, in the case of India, we simply have to deal with this broader
question from the perspective of multiple religions. Let me conclude in
 14 NOTES ON THE PLATFORMIZATION OF MAINSTREAM HINDUISM 297

this respect by raising a few issues that related to the platformization of

religion in India. (1) There is also the need for studies that explore reli-
gious platforms from within a broad understanding of continuities. While
I would argue that platforms offer innovative and creative ways to amplify
religious affect, they are inevitably being built upon historically diverse,
multi-media, multi-communication traditions. Thus we must ask: ‘What
are platforms doing to reinforce this tradition, or are they undermining it’,
‘what do platforms do differently and how do older systems legitimize
their ‘authority’ in the context of disruptive platforms?’ (2) Due to the
evident and intensifying tie-ups between religious platforms and the wider
commercial economy, there is a need for a textured, political economy of
platform religion in India and its micro, meso and macro market manifes-
tations. (3) Finally, there is need to interrogate the religious sociabilities
being created on platforms and apps and their affective links to implicit
and/or partisan politics. In a material world, these are all matters of reli-
gion, and they remain so in the era of platforms.

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 CHAPTER 15

Capitalist Platforms and Subaltern Creativity

Amit Rai

While a kind of “platform” capitalism appears to have emerged in India,

its emergent hegemony is marked by contradictions at every level of its
processes, throughout its logistical infrastructures and along the gradients
of its sensorimotor ecologies (Srnicek 2017). Any analysis of datalogical
media ecologies beyond biopolitics, or of postcolonial informal economies
beyond Subaltern Studies (Clough 2018; Clough and Willse 2011;
Sundaram 2015; Nixon 2019), is inevitably confronted with the historical
imbrication of economic with political antagonisms and processes that
confound analytic frames organized around quantifiable scale. This inter-
penetration of contradictions and multiplicities proceeds in non-linear and
embedded timescales (Jameson 2009; Bergson 1988). It is manifested
within the interstices between cognitive and technological domains, whose
attributes include their different degrees of affective plasticity (see, for
example, the works of Malabou 2005; Deleuze 1992a; DeLanda 1997,
2013; Massumi 2002, 2015a, b; Ash 2012, 2013; Behar 2016). Following
Patricia Clough, I suggest that the datalogical mode in India concerns a
certain “joining of neoliberal economy and neo-conservative governance”

A. Rai (*)
Queen Mary University of London, London, UK
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 299

A. Athique, V. Parthasarathi (eds.), Platform Capitalism in India,
Global Transformations in Media and Communication Research - A
Palgrave and IAMCR Series,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44563-8_15
300 A. RAI

(Clough 2018, 12–13; see also Adey 2009). Indeed, contemporary post-
colonial media analyses have been turned towards algorithms, informal
networks, and Big Data, pointing to “the ways in which a beyond biopoli-
tics is dependent on digital media and computational technologies, which
also have enabled networks to undo system’s thinking about the fixed
relation of parts and whole or parts as constituting the whole” (ibid.).
Networks, forcefully extended by proliferating platforms, have imagina-
tively, discursively, virtually, and actually displaced what “long had been
referred to as the two levels of the social system: structure and individual,
macro and micro”.
Bruno Latour and his colleagues would propose that structure and
individual, macro and micro levels of the system are “not essential realities
but provisional terms”, a “consequence of technologies used for navigat-
ing inside datasets” (Clough 2018, p. 13; see also Latour 2005; Latour
et al. 2012). It is this regulated but unpredictable blurring of scales in
derivative social datalogics that led Clough and her colleagues to articulate
a decisive rupture in contemporary media theory, where

the post-system orientation of the algorithm itself, meant that the algo-
rithm’s ontology is dynamic or mediatic, and that algorithms can learn from
what they do, operating as they do on the indeterminacy of incomputable
data. In this, “The Datalogical Turn” urged a further exploration of the
relationship of digital media, computational technologies and the other-­
than-­human agencies operating in a governance beyond biopolitics and a
post-national capitalism. All through the first two decades of the twenty-first
century, in critical theory, philosophy and media studies, there would be an
ongoing shift in focus from media centered on and attuned to human expe-
rience to theorizing other-than-human agencies operating in protocols,
code, interfaces, platforms, programming, and algorithms, all in the context
of what Mark Hansen would come to refer to as the “data-fication” of
twenty-first-century media. (Clough 2018, pp. 12–13)

The datalogical turn is deeply indebted to Marx’s analysis of commod-

ity fetishism, exploitation, primitive accumulation, the general intellect,
production and circulation, the organic composition of capital, and rela-
tive and absolute surplus value in global processes of capitalist valorization
(1973, 1976). Nonetheless, this retheorization of datalogical value opens
the frame to the different social and affective dimensions of all these
 15 CAPITALIST PLATFORMS AND SUBALTERN CREATIVITY 301

interpenetrating processes, at every scale, and across each of its antago-

nisms and durations (Boltanski and Chiapello 2018; Vercellone 2007). As
Ravi Sundaram has noted, contemporary materialist analyses of Indian
media ecologies have revealed “new informal networks entering the inter-
stices of older, decaying infrastructures” (2015, p. 1). Indeed, the anoma-
lies of a simultaneously Hindutva, patriarchal, and chauvinist nation-state
and an aggressively digitized and globalized political economy have come
to demarcate a field of political struggle pervaded by datalogical and value-­
capturing processes. Practices of piracy, hacking, workaround, jugaad, or
general informality problematize, without overturning the normalized
regimes of value, work, command, and control (Deleuze 1992b). In much
of the popular discourses on informal economy agents, the jugaadu reap-
pears alternatively as a figure of atavistic longing, romantic refusal, Indian
essence, and civilizational disgrace (Rai 2019).
This chapter therefore examines the antagonistic relations of force,
sense, and value in habitations of media embodiment, and capitalist value
capture in contemporary platform ecologies in India. My analysis follows
through on the strategic focus on transcalar datalogical processes in
Clough’s work, taking up the analysis in the context of caste and class
domination and subordination in India (2010, 2018; Clough and Halley
2007; Clough and Willse 2011). Key to this datalogical ecology is the
organising of attention across continually re-segmented populations and
digital practices. The social organization of attention ties media flows of
information and interaction to informal economies of data in unexpected
but patterned ways. Who pays attention to this or that, and why? These
questions are managed through, among other technologies, evolutionary
algorithms of artificial learning in contemporary datalogical ecologies.
Thus, attention is key to the social synthesis of value and data flows.
Beginning with a consideration of attention in today’s media ecologies as
infrastructural to its political economy, I go on to link two antagonistic
nodes, subaltern creativity and platform business models with the securi-
tizing tendencies of the Hindutva state. If the infinite distraction of atten-
tion economies and datalogical securitization share a genealogy, in India,
that genealogy necessarily passes through the distributed agency, both
human and non-human of subaltern creativity. Consequently, this chapter
makes a further contribution to that enfolded history (Pettman 2016).
302 A. RAI

The “New” Political Economy of Indian Datalogical

Ecologies: The Problem of Attention
In 2019, the Hindutva right-wing government of Narendra Modi won a
landslide victory in the national elections. The government would build
on a well-established and global machinic assemblage of neo-fascism and
neoliberalism, consolidating strong ties to Israel and the US, and develop-
ing elaborate networked PR strategies designed to capture attention
(Beller 2012). Previously, Modi’s government had actively pursued mac-
roeconomic stability and a business-friendly regulatory framework, all the
while emphasizing a chauvinist vision of the Indian nation. As Balakrishnan
remarks,

Very likely in reference to both ideology and capacity he had promised

“minimum government, maximum governance.” In a campaign that
emphasised “development,” there was focus on infrastructure and jobs.
“Sabka saath, sabka vikas” [Everyone together, development for everyone]
was a reference to the inclusivity that was imagined. The promise of an
improvement in the lives of the people was contained in the slogan “Achche
din aane wale hai” [Good times are going to come again]. Altogether, a
superior economic performance was high on the campaign promise of Modi.
(Balakrishnan 2019, p. 25).

The power of the slogans was at least partly due to the network effects
of massive circulation of Hindutva memes (e.g. WhatsApp sharing) more
generally and the strategic organization of these processes of registration
and interaction. Attention in this ecology is the scarce resource controlled
through recursive processes of habituation and communication.
In what way does a political ecology of attention help to pose the
question of datalogical platforms better? In his study of the perception
of religious experience and value, Nathaniel Barrett develops a notion of
“perceptualization” as an ecological process (Barrett 2014; Ingold
2014). In research into the human and non-human ecologies of percep-
tion, the process of attention relates different orders of perception,
bodily movements, flows of self-organising matter and data, technologi-
cal substrates, elastic timespaces, appraisals of value, modes of freedom
and control, strategies of reterritorializations, organizational habits, and
short and long term memory (Manning 2013; Grosz 2005, 2013; Ash
2012, 2013; Thrift 2005, 2006). In much of this research, artistic and
creative practice is tied sometimes by analogy, sometimes through
 15 CAPITALIST PLATFORMS AND SUBALTERN CREATIVITY 303

ontological experiments to the process of attention. Indeed, through the

contested thesis of the proliferation of an increasingly precarious “cogni-
tariat”, the creative industries and its research have also become part of
a hegemonic project of global austerity, in which public, common goods
are privatized and individualized. In this the aspect or moment of atten-
tion is reified or abstracted as a privatized and individualized commodity
in which conscious selection becomes a scarce resource enfolded in and
expressed through economic tendencies towards monopolization, oli-
gopolization, and, in its political dimension, popular authoritarianism.
The dominant question appears to be: How can attention be better
entrained and primed to maximally exploit and more easily modulate the
creative potential of its organizational ecology? (Massumi 2010)
In strictly economic terms, the apparent concern for macroeconomic
stability in Modi’s India has actually led to a situation in which the invest-
ment rate of the economy fell, and remained mostly at a level that was
lower than what it was when the government assumed office in 2014.
Consequently, the pursuit of macroeconomic stability a proof-positive of
neoliberal imperatives has now come under incisive criticism (Balakrishnan
2019, p. 25). Criticism of the contradictory economic tendencies of the
Modi era has also intersected with the emergence of Dalit, minority, femi-
nist, queer, postcapitalist social, cultural, and political movements for jus-
tice and equality. Farmer suicides throughout rural India, queer struggles
for identity, rights and visibility, and the critical formation of feminist soli-
darities across caste, sexuality, and class have all intensified throughout this
era. Thus, I will argue that the abstract diagram that runs through both
the fomalizing drive of Modi’s economics and the emergence of political
and social resistances of subaltern desire can be understood as a question
of the affective disruptions of attention (or “crazes”) inherent to the elab-
oration of the techno-perceptual assemblages of neoliberalism in India. It
is amidst the multiple contradictions of macroeconomic stability, political
realignment and reterritorialization, and the (self)organization of atten-
tion that we must understand what is new, if anything, in the implantation
of the digital platform in India.
As Srnicek notes, the historical problem for capitalist firms that contin-
ues to the present day is that “old business models were not particularly
well designed to extract and use data. Their method of operating was to
produce a good in a factory where most of the information was lost, then
to sell it, and never to learn anything about the customer or how the prod-
uct was being used” (2017, p. 26). With the explosion of global logistics
304 A. RAI

networks of lean production since the 1990s consumer data quickly

became a new source of value, although with few exceptions early infor-
mation management system remained a “lossy” model as well. It was in
this context that the business model of the platform emerged, drawing on
the long history of branding and the dwindling recording costs of data-
logical technologies:

Often arising out of internal needs to handle data, platforms became an

efficient way to monopolise, extract, analyse, and use the increasingly large
amounts of data that were being recorded … At the most general level,
platforms are digital infrastructures that enable two or more groups to inter-
act. They therefore position themselves as intermediaries that bring together
different users: customers, advertisers, service providers, producers, suppli-
ers, and even physical objects … Rather than having to build a marketplace
from the ground up, a platform provides the basic infrastructure to mediate
between different groups. (Srnicek 2017, pp. 26–28)

First, data is seen to be the key advantage platforms have over tradi-
tional business models, since the platform “positions itself (1) between
users, and (2) as the ground upon which their activities occur, which thus
gives it privileged access to record them” (Srnicek 2017, pp. 26–27). The
platform proliferates in parallel an “internet of things”, where platforms
mediate whatever digital interaction takes place. Second, digital platforms
inculcate and are reliant on “network effects”, since: “the more numerous
the users who use a platform, the more valuable that platform becomes for
everyone else” (Srnicek 2017, p. 27). Everyone must be on Facebook, or
how else would we socially network? The more numerous the users search-
ing on Google, and the more they search, the better search algorithms
become and the greater utility derived from Google. This generation cycle
is enfolded into network effects, whereby more users beget more users,
and which consequently expresses one of the central tendencies of plat-
form capitalism: monopoly. Because of the ability to rapidly scale many
platform businesses by relying on pre-existing infrastructure and cheap
marginal costs there are few natural limits to growth (ibid.). Uber has
grown rapidly because it does not need to build new factories, but rents
more servers. Platforms deploy a range of tactics to ensure that more and
more users come on board. For example, cross-subsidization: “one arm of
the firm reduces the price of a service or good (even providing it for free),
 15 CAPITALIST PLATFORMS AND SUBALTERN CREATIVITY 305

but another arm raises prices in order to make up for these losses
(ibid., p. 28).
In the platform business model, the strategy is to attract a number of
different groups, partly through fine-tuning the balance between what is
paid, what is not paid, what is subsidized, and what is not subsidized,
which sharply departs from the lean model’s reduction of assets down to
its core competencies and unloading any unprofitable ventures. The fixed
rules, but often open source code, of platforms are mutually generative,
enabling others to build upon them in unexpected ways. As Srincek notes,
the core architecture of “Facebook has allowed developers to produce
apps, companies to create pages, and users to share information in a way
that brings in even more users. The same holds for Apple’s App Store,
which enabled the production of numerous useful apps that tied users and
software developers increasingly into its ecosystem. The challenge of
maintaining platforms is, in part, to revise the cross-subsidisation links and
the rules of the platform in order to sustain user interest. While network
effects strongly support existing platform leaders, these positions are not
unassailable” (ibid.). Thus, we should also ask: in what ways does Srnicek’s
notion of platform capitalism enable a better posing of the twined prob-
lems of value, sense, and force in India’s emergent datalogical security
state? Combined with new state apparatuses and datalogical processes
linked to the Aadhaar identification card, demonetization, PAN card reg-
istration, and mobile-phone security infrastructures (among other net-
work effects of digital processes and caste and class struggle), the extractive
apparatus for data in India’s platform ecology is clearly implicated in the
biopolitical question of “how must Hindutva society be defended?”
It is in India’s Gaza, Kashmir, where what is at stake in the authoritarian
control of datalogical processes of platforms as well as the gendering of
occupied space have become key nodes of struggle, solidarity, and resis-
tance (Kaul 2018). Again, the figure of the hacker has become ubiquitous
in these struggles; in TV and filmic representations of the monstrous ter-
rorist, in gaming culture, and in journalistic discourses, the hacker appears
again and again, but in the shaded aspects of a kind of pharmakon—poi-
son, cure, and scapegoat (Derrida 2004). In India, the figure of the tapori/
jugaadu (Mazumdar 2001; Rai 2019) expresses a set of persistently
untimely practices within and against neoliberal subjectivation that pushes
us to question some of the well-worn themes of historical materialist and
postcolonial analyses: (post)modernity, hybridity, the productive prole-
tariat vs the parasitic lumpen, habituation and tinkering, becoming-minor,
306 A. RAI

fixed-capital technologies and just-in-time production processes, the

nationalist sensoria, subaltern piracy and commodity fetishism, individual
creativity and collective becoming, etc. (Tronti 2010; Surie and Koduganti
2016). Thus, in order to proceed with understanding both the power and
the contradictions of platform capitalism in India, there is an urgent need
to specify the meaning of “subaltern creativity” within India’s dialogical
turn. My analysis here is indebted to the autonomist Marxist tradition of
revolutionary self-organization and the postcolonial uptake of Subaltern
Studies (Tronti 1980, 2010; Virno 2003; Berardi 2009, 2010; Hardt and
Negri 1999, 2009; Lazzarato 2006; Toscano 2009; Wright 2002).

Jugaad as Postcolonial Platform Infrastructure:

The Untimely Sensoria of Subaltern Creativity; or,
the Jugaad of Everyday Life

In the legacy of Subaltern Studies, debated by two of its key practitioners

Chatterjee and Chakrabarty: “the subaltern emerges as a figure which is
no longer conceived in terms of the imagery of the essentialised other. On
the contrary, the emphasis is on locating the mode of appropriation of
modernity by subaltern groups. This departs from the ‘postcolonial’
approach or conception which invokes and harnesses the alterity of the
subaltern to underscore the limit of the universal narrative of modernity”
(Nixon 2019, p. 31; Chatterjee 2012; Chakrabarty 2013). Contemporary
piracy ecologies, as subaltern modes of creative workarounds, affect every-
thing today from social reproduction to bodily habituation (Rai 2019).
This ubiquity is highlighted in an interview conducted in 2015 by media
critic Shiva Thorat on digital jugaad (workaround) practices in Mumbai’s
Dalit communities:
Suresh, the 22-year-old second son of internal migrants from Karnataka,
is a new media entrepreneur involved in intercalating datalogical processes
in the contemporary sensoria of postcolonial neoliberalism: in one of his
aspects, he is a mobile-phone repair-wallah. Interviewed at his local chai
stall, he tells Thorat in Hindi that he lives and works in a poor, working-­
class neighbourhood in the northeast suburbs of the city. For Suresh (who
also speaks Kannada and Marathi), mobile phones are the “future line [of
work]”, he acknowledges a “craze” (in English) for mobile phones; he
insists that the mobile phone is where the value is and where it will be in
the future; “people don’t have food, but everyone needs a mobile”
 15 CAPITALIST PLATFORMS AND SUBALTERN CREATIVITY 307

(interview conducted by Thorat in Hindi, all translations mine) Needless

to say, this craze culture is the history of its attention.
Suresh’s customers are mostly migrant day labourers from UP, Bihar,
and Jharkhand, paying for talktime, data, and media in cash: 2 GB, 50
rupees, 3 GB 70 rupees, 4 GB, 100 rupees: the craze of the day. His ser-
vices include everything from network provider recharge (mostly pre-paid
accounts), web-banking assistance, selling and registering sim cards, con-
tent downloads, to handset repair (aided by DIY YouTube videos), and
spare parts recycling; he emphatically doesn’t deal in pornography; he
doesn’t employ people so much as he calls in favours from a dispersed
network of friends and family, as he needs them. At the end of the month,
his aim is not to have cash but to have increased his stock (phones, parts).
His Canvas 2 phone runs on the battery-intensive Android platform; he
likes the phone’s big screen, it satisfies his “color craze” and his gaming
craze; he hass had 20 phones in seven years. He does not share his phone
with family or friends: “My own phone is private, I don’t like it if someone
looks into my phone” (ibid.).
Suresh performs jugaads (workarounds) all day, every day; jugaad
practice, which for Suresh comes from tapori/subaltern street culture, is
often necessary in a moment of urgency, but then the very infrastructure
of everyday life is jugaad; “everyone does it, but they don’t realise it’s a
jugaad. From waking to sleep it’s jugaad all the time, [tooth]brush karna
ka jugaad, toilet jugaad”. In this culture of the workarounds of social
reproduction and stratified labour, jugaad practice is only shared with
close friends, and not spoken of in front of elders, “out of respect”. For
Suresh all new technologies pass from strange to normal, and by helping
people familiarize themselves with strange technologies he feels he is doing
“social work”. At the time of interview, he had also, aside from his mobile
repair service, opened up a private gym—“like my craze for mobiles, I had
a craze for the gym, but don’t know anything about running one! So I got
a sponsor, and did it with some jugaad” (ibid.).
Suresh’s jugaad ecology thus expresses the multiple tendencies of the
sensory infrastructures of subaltern creativity within and against platform
capitalism. It is untimely in Nietzsche’s sense of that which is against the
dominant organization of time, value, and work, for the benefit of a time
to come: hacking ecologies actualize the potential of the future (1983).
“Serving” Dalit consumers, he rides gradients of “craze” through their
attentional processes, perceptual technogenesis from strange to normal,
and across scales and durations. Here, jugaad is the individualising
308 A. RAI

clinamen enfolded into digital media culture in India, the swerves in sin-
gular practices of hacking and piracy under the historical and collective
conditions of a society structured in different forms of gender, caste, class,
linguistic, and religious dominance (Lucretius 2008; Hall 1996). But the
anomalous refusal of jugaad is also a reified aura, a desiring practice
swathed in a specifically Indian steampunk romance of a quasi-mystical,
atavistic, futurist, and usually coded male agency (Nietzsche 1983;
Benjamin 2008; Adorno 2005, 2009; Rai 2019). As controlled and insur-
gent practice, jugaad expresses the contradictions and potentialities of
Indian media ecologies at a historical moment when “new informal net-
works [are] entering the interstices of older, decaying infrastructures”
(Sundaram 2015, p. 1).
This is the contradictory and overdetermined contexts of subaltern cre-
ativity in India’s emergent platform economy. It also shows the limitations
of Srnicek’s analysis of platform business models when considering con-
texts beyond the global North: first, in postcolonial states transitioning
from five-year economic plans that mixed socialist and free-market princi-
pals through the corrupt agencies of a developmentalist-state bureaucracy,
there is a profoundly different, yet overlapping and interconnected history
of business models between the formal and informal economy. The inter-
zone between formal and informal economies has become the site of a key
political and economic antagonism. Second, a specific style of jugaad, or
the affects and attentional affordances of a given ecology of everyday hack-
ing, already created the conditions for different types of platforms to pro-
liferate. Suresh’s jugaad ecology, rooted in the social and kinship networks
that have been gradually elaborated for at least two generations, gives
social substance to his claim to be able to get the specific jugaad to meet
the customer’s needs. These jugaad ecologies assemblage historically spe-
cific affordances, capacities, tendencies, parameters of change, forces,
machines, desires, values, and material flows. These qualitative multiplici-
ties are the attentional infrastructures of datalogical processes in India.

Sulekha as Formalizing Platform: Caste

and Neoliberal Security

Enter Sulekha.com. Sulekha was founded by Satya Prabhakar and Sangeeta

Kshettry as an app-enhanced web platform enabling different forms of
monetizeable work/service interactions among Indians, raised its initial
 15 CAPITALIST PLATFORMS AND SUBALTERN CREATIVITY 309

investment from Indigo Monsoon Group, and later, from the Palo-Alto-­
based venture capital firm Norwest Venture Partners, among others. In
2015, it raised $28 million; took a sharp hit in profits in 2016–2018 due
to investment in upscaling and diversifying its technologies, and seems on
a profit rebound (Anand 2018). It is today best known as a web-based
search engine and “decision-making platform” for semi-organized, largely
informal, gig-economy local services in India, aggregating databases of
service providers and users which include home care, computer training,
service apartments, party catering, baby-sitting, yoga lessons and auto
repair (similar to Checkatrade.com in the UK). To recall Srnicek’s defini-
tion, Sulekha provides the infrastructure to intermediate between differ-
ent user groups, and it displays clear monopoly tendencies driven by
network effects, it aims to draw in different user groups in creative ways,
and it has a designed core architecture that governs, registers, rents, and
mines the interaction possibilities (Srnicek 2017, p. 28). The platform
biopolitics of Sulekha re-organizes need and desire as dynamic feedbacks
into the mining of data. Their website boasts of “30 million Happy Users,
200,000 Verified Experts, and 200+ categories” traversing Home and
Office, Home Improvement, Properties and Rentals, Education and
Training, Professional Services, Travel and Transport, Health and Wellness,
and Events. Sulekha app contains options for both standardized local
needs (like pest control) and special requirements (catering or interior
design). The emphasis on expertise and registration gives a sense of the
datalogical processes involved in this re-organization of labour in jugaad
ecologies. In a well-known media campaign designed by Ogilvy and
Mather, Sulekha urged its potential customers thus: “Sulekha. Just click
and get reliable service partners who understand that work doesn’t happen
through jugaad. Sulekha: Go Anti-Jugaad!”
What “work” does not happen through jugaad? Recalling Suresh’s
practice, nothing happens without jugaad. This seems to present a contra-
diction to any analysis of platform capitalism. In fact, through jugaad
practice, potentially anything can happen (the irreducible element of
chance immanent to jugaad), but very little can be registered and autho-
rized by the state. There is an intolerable refusal of the formalized organi-
zation of work inherent in jugaad practice. The jugaad domain, as a
counterpublic and countermemory, as a counter-actualizing vector
towards the virtual (the pure potential of living labour), is also the key site
of a struggle around caste and class in India (Toscano 2009). For historical
and structural reasons, in a context in which 92% of all employment is in
310 A. RAI

the informal economy and only around 25% of any given state are upper
(“forward”) caste, it is overwhelmingly Dalit communities who are
involved in precarious jugaad processes cutting across all forms of (in)
formalized work in the Hindutva security state. It pushes us to consider
the sensory and historical infrastructures of datalogical habituations (qual-
itative and quantitative multiplicities) in postcolonial contexts of debilita-
tion, violence, subordination, and control (Ravaisson 2008; Grosz 2013).
Thus, Sulekha is “anti-Jugaad” precisely because it aims at nothing less
than the monopolization of the role of mediator between heterogeneous
services, quotidian habits, and security-crazed consumer demand across
India (Adorno 2014, 2017). Sulekha is a continuation by other means of
the caste and class war launched by the Hindutva state (e.g. as demoneti-
zation, as occupied exception in Kashmir) against Dalit and minority com-
munities, and the expansion of neoliberal governmentality through the
mode of digital platform habituation (Bhattacharya 2019, Coleman and
Grove 2009.). The Sulekha platform can be read as an expression of the
colonizing drive of capitalist command (Tronti 1980; Toscano 2009;
Srnicek 2017).

Towards a New Political Ecology

of Datalogical Sensoria

In India, platforms, and especially “gig mediators” such as Sulekha.com,

emerge within the contexts of structures of dominance and creative resis-
tance expressed in jugaad (informal, “non-productive”, partially “uncom-
manded”) socio-economic practices (Toscano 2009). Jugaad practice
embodies a refusal of capitalist command, but each jugaad event is a
repeated transgression of Brahmanical negation; jugaad networks operate
through the multiple tendencies and within-and-against complicities of
India’s post-capitalist economy. But jugaad—as word, discourse, image,
intensity—is already a reification, and increasingly a commodification of
the preindividual, (non-)human processes of autonomous creativity; its
tendencies are to individualize and quantify collective processes and inten-
sive multiplicities, and all the more as the datalogical becomes the govern-
ing discourse of jugaad. The diagram of global capitalism in its datalogical
mode in India has thus thrown up several key real antagonisms, intractable
contradictions, and intensive becomings. As of yet, the political and eco-
nomic organization of attention, attention as datalogical, remains
 15 CAPITALIST PLATFORMS AND SUBALTERN CREATIVITY 311

completely interpenetrated by practices of “informal” social reproduction

and forms of work. Consequently, I have tried to diagram here a transcalar
jugaad infrastructure that undergirds the emergence of platform capital-
ism in India as its condition of possibility.
In a diagrammatic analysis of datalogical ecologies and subaltern prac-
tice what emerges as key sites of social and interpretative struggle are the
stochastic resonances between historical and material tendencies in non-­
representational, and increasingly profitable feedback, their patterned but
unpredictable (im)measures and (im)probabilities (Clough 2018,
pp. 140–42, Lury et al. 2012). Moreover, these infrastructures all have
historically specific affects, affordances, tendencies, and vectors of becom-
ing: jugaad is the North Indian name of one style of self-organizing such
within-and-against (in)formal infrastructures (Hardt and Negri 2009; Rai
2019; Deleuze 1988). The creative-complicit refusals and affirmations
enfolded into jugaad practices evidence this anomalous politics (Spivak
1988; Best 1999). Indeed, the non-coinciding resonances between data-
logical processes and subaltern creativity consistently highlight what
Italian workerist have argued is the antagonistic “autonomy of the politi-
cal” (see Tronti 1980, 2010). In the contexts of the globalized and post-
colonial North, Toscano argues that

any work that seeks to reinject the workerist method of antagonism into the
current composition of social relations, into the uneven and combined
development of capitalist command and political struggles, will be obliged
to tackle two questions: How do we confront a situation in which capital-
ism’s vicious rounds of accumulation by dispossession point to its continued
and virulent, if contradictory, desire to emancipate itself from the working
class, if not from humanity as a whole? And what does it mean to revive or
prolong the methodologies and political gestures of workerism and auton-
omy at a time when—in many of the core capitalist economies that were
always the privileged terrain of workerism—we are confronted by “a depo-
liticization of society that reinforces the power of dominant forces”?
(Toscano 2009, p. 90)

Unlike historical conditions in which capitalist organization and habit-

uation and datalogical infrastructures are secured by the strategic alliance
between capital, white supremacy, and state monopoly of violence, in
postcolonial India, where upper-caste Hindutva forces, militarized and
patriarchal, have aligned with a global capitalist class committed to accu-
mulation by dispossession, the datalogical regime of biopolitical security
312 A. RAI

can always when necessary dispense entirely with the platform and its
“interactive” accoutrements: in Kashmir today helicopters and drones
patrol and register movement from the skies, on the ground, every 100
yards a checkpoint, all mobile-phone and Internet services summarily sus-
pended. In this suspension of the network effect, another platform comes
violently to the fore: the Hindutva nation. Especially under such condi-
tions of occupation, jugaad networks operate their proliferating and con-
tagious hacks, drawing on already existing tendencies of morphogenesis in
techno-perceptual assemblages (DeLanda 2013; Simondon 2011; Deleuze
and Guattari 1987; Guattari 1995). Functioning through the historical
and material vectors of rumour and gossip, jugaad networks affirm the
autonomy of subaltern politics within and against the datalogical nation-­
state (see Guha 1983; Jameson 2007). In what sense can we understand
this postcolonial enfolding of the state of exception and occupation, its
populist memification as unitary nation-platform, and the datalogical pro-
cesses of post-probabilistic networks as a qualitatively different, uneven
and combined, sensorium? Is it simply the untimely political ecology of
our present, “acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time
and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come” (Nietzsche 1983,
p. 60; Agamben 1998, 2005)?
In the meteoric rise of populism throughout the global North and in
specific countries of the postcolonial South over the past decade what has
been unintentionally problematized in everyday life is a putative tendency
towards depoliticization. Yet the overt politicization of more and more
elements and dynamics of everyday life, from social reproduction to food
ecologies, suggests that datalogical tendencies paradoxically affect ambiva-
lent forms of re-politicization. The aura of the datalogical, which resides in
the radical indiscernibility of Big Data and the monopoly on artificial intel-
ligence, has been repeatedly fractured with each new cybersecurity breach,
each new state conspiracy shared on WhatsApp. Instead of establishing an
order of rules that must be followed, the adaptable algorithmic architec-
tures of datalogical processes seemingly allow rules and parameters to
“adapt to one another without necessarily operating in keeping with a
progressive or teleological sequence. These adaptations do not lead “to
the evolution of one algorithm or the other but to a new algorithmic
behavior” (Parisi 2009, p. 357; Clough 2018, p. 142). As Clough points
out: Big Data does not care about “you” so much as the bits of seemingly
random information that bodies generate or that they leave as a data trail;
the aim is to affect or pretend novelty (Clough 2018, pp. 142–143). In
 15 CAPITALIST PLATFORMS AND SUBALTERN CREATIVITY 313

India’s political contexts, the registration procedures of datalogical pro-

cesses (digital trails) are continuous with the sometimes secret, sometimes
foregrounded biopolitical archipelago of states of exception scattered
throughout Hindutva and its diasporas. Thus, the molecular and molar
reaching beyond number of adaptive platform architectures dovetails with
the mobile and predictive extrajudicial force that is the threat and reality
of India’s neo-fascist machines.

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 Index

A targeted advertising, 13, 68, 72,

Aadhaar, 2, 14, 36, 201–216, 247, 241, 268, 269, 295
250, 305 Affect, 88, 139, 158, 167, 252, 297,
Aadhaar Amendment Bill 2019, 306, 308, 311, 312
201, 211 Affordances, 1, 13, 26, 28, 29, 34,
Access, 2, 9, 10, 31, 32, 46, 47, 52, 158, 205, 214, 234, 252, 253,
59, 75, 90, 92, 94, 101, 107, 273, 308, 311
113, 117, 119, 124, 136–138, Agendas, 233
145, 158, 161, 178, 185, 188, Aggregation, 7, 12, 14, 24, 26, 31,
189, 202, 204, 207, 212, 215, 33, 37, 83, 264, 266, 267,
225, 231–234, 241, 242, 244, 270, 271
246, 247, 252, 263, 265, 268, Aggregators, 28, 36, 89, 120, 170,
274, 275, 277, 283, 284, 270, 271
288, 304 Airbnb, 7, 14
Accountability, 195, 222 Airtel, 53, 112–114, 121, 137, 138,
Accumulation, 29, 160, 264, 268, 212, 213, 245
300, 311 Airtime, 36, 38
Activism, 229 Algorithms, 68, 72, 74, 83, 118,
Actor Network Theory, 157 122, 153–156, 158–161,
Adani, Gautam, 11, 46 164–172, 177, 178, 180,
Aditya Birla Group, 53 190, 252, 266, 267, 278,
Advertising, 81 300, 301, 304, 312
digital advertising, 3, 59 Alibaba, 32, 44, 58, 145

© The Author(s) 2020 317

A. Athique, V. Parthasarathi (eds.), Platform Capitalism in India,
Global Transformations in Media and Communication Research - A
Palgrave and IAMCR Series,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44563-8
318 INDEX

Amazon, 3, 9, 10, 25, 32, 36, 44, 57, B

59, 87–103, 109, 115, 117, 120, Balaji, 134, 137, 143
124, 131, 135, 137, 146, 148, Bandwidth, 2, 13, 72, 75, 93, 129,
206, 289 245, 257, 275, 277
Amazon Prime Video, 87–103 Banks, 32, 55, 56, 75, 76, 139, 186,
Ambani, Anil, 55, 246, 254 187, 203, 205, 211, 213, 214, 247
Ambani, Mukesh, 45, 52–54, 59, 93, Bazaar, 24, 26, 37, 240, 262
214, 246, 254 Benefits, 2, 5, 25, 29, 32, 36, 44,
Andhra Pradesh, 11 58–60, 82, 90, 94, 118, 133,
Appadurai, Arjun, 4 139, 143, 164, 211, 212, 227,
Apple, 11, 44, 103, 109, 115, 124, 241, 244, 246, 247, 293, 307, 312
131, 225 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 25, 69,
Apps, 13, 37, 74–76, 96, 120, 154, 78, 211, 221, 223, 224, 227,
156, 169, 221, 225, 226, 244, 229, 244, 249, 250, 282, 296
247, 248, 282–285, 288–290, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited
295, 297, 305 (BSNL), 11, 75, 94, 95, 245
Arbitrage, 71, 264–268, Bihar, 262, 273, 307
271–273, 275–278 Billionaires, 45–48
Archives, 89, 100, 264, 273–278 Blockchain, 71
Artificial intelligence (AI), 2, 156, 312 Black money, 12, 249
Arvikar, Hrishikesh, 17 Bollywood, 87, 96, 111, 112, 114,
Asia, 3, 99 118, 121, 123, 145, 246, 251,
Assets, 29, 35, 38, 55–57, 70–73, 75, 253, 272, 283
76, 82, 83, 116, 134, 137, 140, Bombay, see Mumbai
177, 179, 214, 305 BookMyShow, 114
Athique, Adrian, 2, 3, 6, 12, 13, 17, Bottlenecks, 33, 52
24–28, 31, 44, 50, 60, 68, 69, Bouquillon, Philippe, 49–51, 54, 59,
72, 76, 77, 144, 206, 241, 245, 109, 116
246, 248, 249, 266, 268, 270 Bratton, S. H., 31, 240, 241, 248
Audiences, 8, 9, 34, 35, 68, 79, 83, Braudel, Fernand, 49–51, 57, 59, 60,
88, 94–99, 102, 112, 115, 118, 130, 132, 137, 139
134, 135, 154, 157–159, 161, Brazil, 145, 147, 226
162, 164–168, 170, 171, 206, Broadband, 11, 32, 52–54, 93, 133,
223, 224, 227, 228, 231, 234, 137, 275
241, 244, 252, 262, 263, 265, Brokerages, 13, 14
269, 271–273, 277 Business models, 12, 24, 28, 46, 102,
Australia, 7, 146 113, 115, 118, 119, 155, 177,
Authentication, 201, 202, 206, 207, 179, 180, 265, 267, 269, 301,
209–212, 215 303–305, 308
Automation, 2, 5–7, 11, 14, 16, 26,
33, 34, 154–156, 172, 252,
253, 255 C
AVOD, 9 Calculation, 4, 181, 240, 263, 266
Ayurveda, 283, 292, 295 Calcutta, 100, 110
 INDEX 319

Capability, 92, 169 Citizens, 15, 16, 27, 78, 83, 93, 155,
Capacity, 14, 15, 24, 27, 32, 33, 38, 157, 161, 163, 169, 202–206,
44, 46, 54, 57, 93, 130, 172, 191, 212, 214, 215, 223, 225, 231,
207, 211, 230, 255, 302, 308 234, 253, 255, 275
Capitalism, 1, 2, 4, 5, 17, 23–39, Class
59–60, 67–83, 179, 202, 209, middle classes, 5, 25, 33, 223, 251
265, 299, 304–307, 309, 311 working classes, 75, 222, 266, 270,
Braudelian capitalism, 51 275, 306, 311
crony capitalism, 46, 47, 60 Clean India, 227, 256
digital capital, 58 Clickbait, 13, 239, 242, 252, 255, 283
digital capitalism, 34, 156 Cobrapost, 249–251
global capitalism, 45, 310 Comicstaan, 37, 87, 91, 96–99
platform capitalism, 1, 2, 4, 5, 17, Commerce, 1, 4, 5, 26, 27, 37, 50, 75
23–39, 59–60, 67–83, 132, e-commerce, 3, 6, 13, 25, 29, 33,
179, 202, 203, 209, 265, 299, 57–59, 88, 93, 115, 116, 119,
304–307, 309, 311 124, 135, 193, 214, 226
surveillance capitalism, 202, Commodities
203, 247 commodification, 13, 28, 31, 95,
Capitalization, 136, 140, 142, 202, 282, 287, 289, 294, 310
143, 179 commodity forms, 13, 256
Cash, 12, 26, 27, 33, 45, 47, 184, intangible commodities, 4
206, 250, 307 integrated commodities, 207,
Cashless India, 12, 15, 27, 76 247, 248
Cassettes, 110, 112, 263, 265–268, Communalism, 14, 73, 254, 266, 268,
270, 271, 274 272, 274, 276, 277, 296
Caste Communication
Bahujans, 256 communication layer, 4, 31, 245, 248
Brahmins, 256 direct communication, 222,
Dalits, 284 227, 272
CD, 112, 117, 122, 123 personal communication, 34, 224
Celebrity, 79–82, 102, 161–163, 227, political communication,
228, 250, 251, 265, 269, 291 77–79, 221–234
Channels, 4, 8–10, 12, 25, 26, 32, 52, political economy of
73, 74, 79, 82, 95, 98, 110, 122, communication, 130, 147
140, 146, 154, 161, 169, 222, social communication, 32, 34, 226
223, 225, 226, 232, 234, 241, Companies
243, 244, 249, 251, 252, 254, East India Company, 38
267–271, 296 internet companies, 80, 114
China, 7, 44, 46, 58–60, 92, 112, technology companies, 25, 28, 45,
145, 147 108, 158, 190, 207, 230, 239
Christianity, see Religion Competition, 3, 15, 28, 50–54, 57,
Cinema 60, 87, 97, 103, 115, 121, 124,
cinema halls, 9 130, 132, 136, 138, 147, 179,
home cinema, 9 224, 233, 246, 273
320 INDEX

Computers, 11, 309 185, 194, 225, 233, 244, 246,

Concentration, 28, 36, 51, 52, 54, 99, 268, 271, 304
118, 124, 138, 156, 249, 251 Credibility, 80, 156, 163, 201, 203,
Conglomerates, 2, 3, 7, 38, 45, 55, 204, 209–215, 229, 234
56, 134, 136, 254, 256 Culture
Congress Party, 223 folk culture, 10
Connectivity, 10, 92, 93, 246, 264, media culture, 308
266, 290, 291 popular culture, 5, 26, 78, 79, 81,
Consumers, 4, 5, 13, 15, 25–27, 32, 82, 272, 276, 278
35, 37, 52, 69, 81, 94, 103, 110, vernacular culture, 26, 276
113, 116, 118–120, 122, 124,
129, 131, 133, 138, 145, 171,
180, 190, 194, 223, 229, D
245–247, 263, 264, 266, 268, Data
270, 271, 278, 283, 290–292, big data, 77, 158, 171, 300, 312
295, 304, 307, 310 data access, 107
Consumption, 5, 11, 43, 93, 102, data analytics, 221, 224, 269
113, 115, 119, 120, 122, 133, databases, 157, 203, 213, 224,
134, 137, 145, 153, 155, 169, 225, 309
172, 180, 247, 262, 266, 268, data breaches, 212, 213, 215
274–276, 278, 292 data centres, 2, 3, 5, 11, 59, 88
guided consumption, 34, datafication, 4, 10, 208, 209,
35, 68, 271 250, 253
Contestation, 201, 202 data flows, 43, 57, 206, 301
Control, 9, 26, 27, 43, 44, 46, 52, 68, data generation, 10, 255
71, 74, 91, 94, 119, 133, 140, data harvesting, 44, 68
143, 179–181, 184, 189, 190, data inputs, 182
192–195, 249, 264, 266, 268, data mining, 1, 28, 31, 83, 248
270, 271, 276, 278, 284, 292, data packets, 92, 246, 248, 253
301, 302, 305, 309, 310 data packs, 13, 31, 275
Convergence, 2, 6, 8–10, 24, 28, 34, data points, 13, 183, 240
67, 68, 156, 161, 276 data privacy, 15, 118, 202, 204, 209
Copyright, 108, 116, 117, data protection, 57–59, 201, 203,
122–124, 262 204, 206, 209–215
Copyright Amendment Act 2012, data sovereignty, 214
122, 123 data structure, 267
Corporates, 43, 47, 51, 55, 56, 82, free data, 39, 245–247
110, 120, 241, 249, 251, 256, metadata, 68, 72, 257, 270, 275
269, 288, 295 public data, 16
Corruption, 15, 16, 46, 69, 209, social data, 14, 35
222, 249 user data, 13, 28, 35, 36, 118, 204,
Costs, 5, 12, 16, 29, 31, 33, 36, 37, 208, 215
39, 50, 54, 55, 90, 91, 93, Data Protection Framework, 57, 58
110–112, 133, 135, 137, 180, Dating, 13, 96
 INDEX 321

Debt, 53, 55, 56, 74–76, 81 Documentation, 183, 194, 203, 275
Delivery, 5, 12, 30, 33, 75, 76, 90, DoolNews, 154, 159, 160,
112, 179, 182, 183, 195, 204, 162–165, 167–172
211, 215, 282 Drivers, 14, 26, 74, 90, 115, 177,
Demand, 9, 12, 48, 49, 75, 94, 178, 183, 188, 189, 191, 192,
95, 99, 110, 135, 157, 180, 206, 241
183, 208, 246, 256, 263, Duplication, 16, 97
272, 310 DVD, 262, 266, 267, 269, 270,
Demographics, 77, 79, 210, 213, 224, 273, 274
268, 270, 278, 295
Demonetisation, 12, 27, 33, 45, 67,
76, 79, 255, 305, 310 E
DEN Networks, 9, 53, 54 Ecology, 4, 26, 34, 36, 103, 153,
Dependency, 2, 11, 44, 45, 48, 49, 155, 163, 228, 252, 262, 265,
59, 60, 124, 187, 194, 195 301–303, 305, 307, 308,
Derivatives, 67–83, 268, 300 310–313
Development, 2, 6, 9, 11, 12, 31, 44, Economists, 59, 71, 210
47–49, 54, 60, 91, 93, 107–116, Economy, 1–17, 24, 25, 27, 30,
121, 133, 136, 144, 146, 147, 32–38, 43, 45, 74, 77, 88, 179,
203, 204, 210, 214, 250, 253, 195, 202, 203, 246, 264, 267,
291, 302, 311 268, 273, 276, 278, 288,
Devices, 25, 34, 93, 94, 110, 131, 295, 308
153, 181, 243, 244, 246, 247, digital economy, 2, 3, 7, 30, 32,
262, 263, 265, 266, 272, 274, 44, 47, 58–60, 88, 92, 93,
275, 277, 283, 284, 288 160, 177–180, 185, 190,
Digital India, 2–4, 11, 14, 24, 26, 37, 193–195, 203, 204,
38, 93, 112, 228, 245, 255, 291 213–215, 243
Discovery, 24, 28 economic circulation, 277
Dis-embedding, 12 economic stability, 193
Disney, 100, 134, 143 media economy, 6, 8–10, 36, 81,
Disruption, 4, 12, 24, 27, 124, 193, 102, 155, 240, 246, 247, 262,
247, 249–251, 264, 303 264, 266, 273
Distribution mediated economy, 6, 8, 10–12
capital, 60 neoliberal economics, 299
distribution layer, 31, 33 networked media economy, 43–60
film, 134, 144 platform economy, 1–17, 24, 25,
informal distribution, 263 27, 30, 32–38, 45, 74, 77, 179,
music, 116, 118 195, 202, 204, 246, 264, 267,
television (TV), 52, 54 268, 270, 273, 276, 278, 288,
Distrust, 234 295, 308
Diversification, 37, 109, 116, 120, political economy, 4, 49, 60, 68,
240–245, 251, 254, 256 297, 301–306
Diversity, 24, 60, 102, 109, 116, sharing economy, 14, 33, 270
121–124, 183, 253, 266, 271, transactional economy, 2, 93
290, 295 wider economy, 10, 12
322 INDEX

Ecosphere, 87–103 98, 109, 112, 131, 154, 156,

Ecosystems, 3, 25, 30, 39, 59, 74, 81, 157, 161–163, 165, 169–171,
88, 89, 94, 102, 154, 155, 178, 206, 221, 225–227, 229–231,
186–190, 193, 195, 222, 247, 242, 250, 281, 295, 304, 305
264, 266, 267, 269, 270, Families, 13, 55, 56, 186, 187, 226,
291, 305 229, 230, 246, 254, 274, 307
Education, 179, 193, 231, 287, 309 Farmers, 211, 222, 256, 303
Efficiency, 26, 195, 288 Fascism, 249
efficiency gains, 5, 16 Fear, 48, 101, 159, 188, 189, 194,
Elections, 29, 69, 74, 77–79, 239–257, 290
221–224, 227, 229–232, 234, Federation of Indian Chambers of
239, 245, 249–251, 253–255, Commerce and Industry (FICCI),
282, 296, 302 92, 95, 232
Elites, 26, 49, 60, 92, 110, 162, 223, Financialization, 36, 139
240, 243 Fintech, 12, 36, 207, 210
Embedding, 88, 206, 251 Fitzgerald, Scott, 9, 17, 48, 52
Employers, 177, 180, 190 5G, 5, 37, 56, 112, 245
Employment, 5, 75, 113, 115, 178, Flipkart, 3, 25, 29, 90, 121, 208, 289
187, 193–195, 275, 309 FlipKart, 3
Emporiums, 23–39 Food, 12, 26, 33, 75, 76, 79, 98, 188,
Empowerment, 204, 209, 215 283, 290, 291, 306, 312
Enforcement, 15, 47, 123, 124, 234, PDS, 16
243, 296 4G, 52, 75, 92, 94, 112, 225, 246, 247
Entertainment, 6, 24, 37, 38, 48, 67, France, 147
79, 82, 92, 94, 95, 114, 134, Free basics, 3, 75
138, 168, 169, 206, 229, 232, Freedom, 94, 169, 178, 179, 192,
233, 247, 265, 290 195, 242, 253, 277, 302
Entrepreneurs, 3, 306 Freemium, 90, 119
Equality, 180, 303 Free speech, 28
Essel Group, 53, 55
Evolution, 1, 5, 7, 8, 25, 27, 32,
34–36, 58, 103, 109, 110, 118, G
122, 145, 210, 246, 312 Gaana, 114, 117, 119–121, 124
Exchange, 4, 6–8, 12–14, 16, 23–27, Gender, 165, 240, 244, 253, 256, 308
30–32, 34, 36, 38, 49, 50, 60, Genealogies, 34, 37, 301
70, 71, 81, 83, 110, 132, 136, Genres, 81, 98, 117, 118, 121–124,
138–147, 264, 270, 277, 294 265, 272
Exclusion, 16, 180, 190–192, 194, Geography, 7, 25, 60, 98, 261
202, 205, 209, 211, 253, 255 Germany, 147
Extraction, 13, 35, 43, 48, 52 Gilded age, 43–60
Gillespie, Tarleton, 27, 88, 93, 158
Goods, 3, 23–27, 29, 32, 35–37, 45,
F 88, 91, 93, 108–110, 131, 132,
Facebook, 3, 9, 13, 16, 28, 37, 44, 69, 161, 165, 166, 168, 170, 171,
72, 73, 75, 76, 78, 80, 82, 94, 179, 182, 183, 189, 191, 193,
 INDEX 323

204, 206, 213–215, 233, 240, Ilavarasan, Vigneshwara, 17, 193

242, 267, 282–284, 288, 291, Images, 72, 73, 83, 210, 227, 231,
292, 302–304 269, 285, 286, 310
Google, 3, 10, 28, 29, 44, 68, 73, 75, Inclusion, 16, 75, 180, 190–192, 194,
76, 80, 94, 109, 115, 124, 131, 209, 244, 253, 276
160, 161, 165, 167, 225, 231, Independent and Public Spirited
269, 304 Media Foundation (IPSMF),
Governance 170, 241
algorithmic governance, 68, 71, 75, Indian Record Company (INRECO),
153–172, 177, 178, 180, 192, 110, 116
194, 195, 268 India Stack, 2, 207, 208, 248
e-governance, 14, 16, 93 India Today, 231, 241
Government of India, 2, 16, 25, 35, Industry
38, 100, 101, 109, 209, 215, cinema industry, 273
245, 293 creative industries, 108, 113,
Granularity, 72 130, 303
Gratification, 7, 38, 228–230 film industry, 29, 81, 117,
Growth, 2, 5, 11, 12, 43, 44, 58, 67, 123, 138
68, 74–76, 90, 92, 94, 111, 116, music industry, 107–118, 120, 121,
133, 134, 145, 179, 193, 123, 124, 265
201–204, 209, 232, 264, 266, news industry, 77, 154, 156,
276, 289, 304 158, 170
software industry, 10, 11
telecoms industry, 109, 114, 115,
H 124, 136, 138, 246
Hierarchy, 47, 50, 54, 57, 123 Inequality, 44, 45, 177–195, 252,
Hinduism, see Religion 253, 288
Hindutva, see Politics Influence, 8, 12, 28, 35, 45, 49, 52,
Hong Kong, 114, 119, 134, 142 54, 69, 72, 139, 145, 183, 188,
Hotels, 7, 29, 31 191, 195, 208, 209, 240, 250,
Hotstar, 9, 89, 90, 100, 101, 134, 265, 285
137, 146 Informality, 73, 243, 261–278, 301
Hungama, 114, 116, 117, 119 Informal sector, 5, 14, 26, 36
Huwei, 38 Information, 6–9, 13, 27, 29, 34,
Hybridity, 248, 305 35, 44, 50, 68, 77, 93, 100,
113, 124, 130, 131, 154,
157, 159, 161, 162, 168,
I 169, 183, 207–209, 213–215,
Identification, 8, 15, 50, 51, 223–225, 229–234, 240, 242,
202–206, 305 250, 252, 270, 295, 301,
Identity, 16, 70, 90, 190, 201, 202, 303–305, 312
205, 207–212, 240, 250, Information and communications
253, 303 technology (ICT), 49, 107, 108,
Ideology, 109, 170, 241, 282, 302 116, 120, 124, 134
324 INDEX

Infrastructure, 2, 3, 5, 8, 10–13, 27, Journalism, 9, 10, 79, 80, 153–161,

28, 30, 31, 33, 36–38, 44, 48, 163–165, 167–169, 233, 234,
52–56, 59, 60, 88, 91–95, 100, 240, 243, 249
102, 107, 112, 113, 179, 240, Jugaad, 301–306, 309–312
245, 246, 248, 249, 257, 263, Jurisdiction, 7, 15, 25, 99
267, 269, 271, 275, 283, 301,
302, 304–311
Innovation, 12, 47, 165, 195, 204, K
210, 269 Kashmir, 16, 27, 250, 305, 310, 312
Insolvency Bankruptcy Code Kerala, 154
(IBC), 55, 56 Kumar, Akshaya, 17, 25, 79, 81, 96,
Instagram, 13, 98, 112, 161, 113, 251, 252, 262, 268,
224–227, 242 273, 276
Integration, 88–91, 94, 131, 133,
134, 136, 143, 156, 203, 207,
270, 284, 295 L
Intellectual property, 10, 58, 122, 269 Labour, 29, 31, 47, 49, 54, 57, 69,
Interactivity, 6, 79, 291 70, 73, 75, 77, 80, 90, 96, 109,
Intermediaries, 107, 108, 113, 178, 123, 130, 133, 139, 145–147,
269, 270, 304 154, 155, 157, 159, 163, 166,
Internet, 6, 10, 16, 24, 29, 31, 44, 52, 170, 171, 178–180, 183–189,
53, 58, 72, 73, 75, 78, 80–82, 191, 192, 194, 208, 243, 252,
92–94, 99, 101, 112, 114–116, 264, 269, 271, 275–277, 286,
119, 124, 135, 156, 158, 179, 291, 299, 301, 306–311
212, 223, 225, 228, 231–234, autonomic labour, 156
242, 247, 248, 257, 275, 283, business-partners, 103, 187, 188
287, 296, 312 daily labourers, 26
Interoperability, 4, 6, 31, 34, 36 digital labour, 170, 178–180, 191
Intersectionality, 248 employees, 15, 16, 112, 120, 123,
Intimacy, 4, 70, 79, 81, 82, 207 159, 179, 180, 207, 245
Investment free labour, 154, 156, 164,
foreign direct investment, 52, 111, 165, 171
115, 140 informal labour, 14
foreign investment, 115, 116, 140 knowledge labour, 156
investment strategy, 47 labourers, 156, 307
Ippodhu, 154, 160, 162, precarious labour, 275
164–166, 168–172 unwitting labour, 248
Ithurbide, Christine, 17, 116 work practices, 154, 157
Languages
Bhojpuri, 262, 263, 266, 268,
J 271–273, 276–278
Japan, 142, 214 English, 92, 98–100, 135, 227,
Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), 231, 244, 269, 306
252, 253 Haryanvi, 262, 266, 268
 INDEX 325

Himachali, 266, 268 M

Hindi, 96, 114, 121, 135, 144, 148, Madhya Pradesh, 273
154, 231, 243, 252, 261, 262, Make in India, 115
265, 268, 306, 307 Market intelligence, 28
Kannada, 154, 306 Markets
Malayalam, 154 automated markets, 31, 179
Marathi, 252, 263, 306 capital markets, 38
Santhali, 268 competitive markets, 46, 49, 51, 60,
Tamil, 96, 154, 161 109, 118, 120, 130, 232,
Telugu, 96, 154, 268, 269 234, 294
Uttarakhandi, 268 formal markets, 263, 264
Latour, Bruno, 166, 171, 300 informal markets, 30, 33,
Law, 8, 46, 67, 124, 138, 140, 202, 263, 264
203, 205–210, 213, 276 market dominance, 54
censorship law, 99, 100 marketplaces, 2, 3, 7, 9, 25, 30, 32,
Citizen Amendment Act, 250 35, 76, 229, 284, 291, 304
copyright law, 122–124 market segments, 68, 80, 244
data protection law, 203, 209, market systems, 1, 30, 31, 38
211, 215 multi-sided markets, 8, 25,
injunctions, 211 32, 35, 88
judgements, 211 secondary markets, 8
National Security Act, 250 telecom market, 47, 52, 245
privacy law, 203 transactional markets, 31
public transportation law, 190 Matrimony, 14
Legal, see Law McChesney, Robert, 34, 77, 79, 80
Legibility, 2, 8, 14, 27, 33, 72, Media, 228
76, 203–209 broadcast media, 234
Liberalisation, 2, 25, 35, 36, 46, 51, media attention, 77, 79
111, 115, 116, 140 media content, 6, 36, 89, 92, 112,
Licensing, 15, 46, 95, 113, 117 228, 263, 268, 270
Literacy, 222, 231, 233, 234 media events, 82
Loans, 55, 56, 75, 186, 187, 241, media industries, 9, 10, 31, 35, 39,
243, 288 45, 51, 101, 130, 134, 148,
Lobato, Ramon, 7, 26, 34, 89, 92, 233, 263, 264, 268, 270,
101, 269, 270 271, 277
Localisation, 57–59, 95–97, 102, media producers, 35, 88
118, 214 media systems, 6, 49, 228
Logic, 1, 5, 6, 8, 10, 13, 16, 24–29, news media, 74, 77, 80, 155, 161,
31, 36, 38, 50, 51, 70, 82, 88, 166, 171, 224, 228, 231, 233,
108, 109, 130, 138, 147, 155, 234, 243, 244, 251, 252
171, 180, 206, 226, 228, 240, print media, 140, 158, 232, 233
241, 245, 246, 249, 255, 257, social media, 13, 16, 30, 57, 58, 74,
263, 264, 267, 269, 276, 98, 99, 156–158, 161–164,
294, 295 169–172, 179, 221–234, 249,
Logistics, 1, 6, 11, 12, 59, 194, 303 253, 254, 291, 295
326 INDEX

Medianama, 119 Nationalism, 82, 214, 227, 228, 281,

Metaphors, 24, 27–30, 210 283, 286, 287
Microsoft, 3, 38, 44, 131, 206, 231 Navigation, 182, 271, 275
Middle classes, 5, 25, 33, 223, 251 NDTV, 241, 243, 244, 251,
Migration, 195, 262 254, 255
Mobile phones, 6, 10, 54, 88, 92, 93, Netflix, 6, 7, 9, 26, 32, 34, 68, 88, 90,
95, 102, 112, 122, 136, 140, 92, 98–101, 117, 135–137, 143,
159, 160, 169, 184, 203, 205, 145, 146
222, 224–226, 230, 232, 233, Networks, 2, 3, 5, 8, 10–14, 28, 34,
262, 266, 267, 274, 275, 288, 36–38, 48, 50, 52–56, 58–60, 72,
305, 306, 312 75, 77, 78, 81, 94, 112, 113,
Modi, Narendra, 69, 76, 79, 82, 205, 116, 129, 134, 136–138, 157,
214, 222–224, 227–228, 247, 180, 208, 222, 225, 226, 229,
250, 251, 254, 302, 303 231–233, 245, 246, 248, 263,
MoJo, 160 266, 267, 269, 286, 288,
Monetisation, 4, 9, 13, 112, 135, 171, 300–302, 304, 305,
215, 266, 269, 282–284, 286 307–310, 312
Money multichannel networks, 269–271
black money, 12, 249 New Delhi, 12, 23, 177, 180, 181,
digital money, 12, 76 185, 187, 195
mobile money, 12, 27, 243, 244 News
Monopoly, 3, 9, 28, 30, 32, 51, 52, fake news, 34, 73, 77, 78, 80, 163,
54, 57, 60, 68, 69, 72, 75, 78, 229–231, 233, 234, 249, 253,
80–83, 110, 247, 249, 268, 304, 257, 296
309, 311, 312 news apps, 73, 244
Mumbai, 100, 110, 244, 251, 253, newsfeeds, 241, 242
262, 263, 265, 306 platform news, 239–257
Music New Zealand, 147
Bhojpuri music, 266, 273, 277 Novelty, 5, 24, 25, 230, 312
concerts, 72, 124, 253, 262, 264,
266, 271–273, 275–278
devotional music, 122 O
film music, 111, 115, 116, 123 Ola, 3, 7, 12, 26, 29, 76, 177,
folk music, 10, 262, 273, 277 180–182, 188
international music, 111, 115, 122 Oligopoly, 57, 121
recorded music, 109, 117, 131, OneIndia, 58, 154, 160, 161,
132, 261, 262 163–166, 169–172
Musicians, 111, 120, 123 Only Much Louder (OML), 98, 114
Muslims, 230, 250, 283 Opportunity, 4, 13, 16, 32, 33, 47,
52, 56, 73, 107, 111, 112, 115,
120, 123, 131, 133, 164, 177,
N 178, 186, 187, 192, 194, 195,
National champions, 2, 15, 37, 256, 277, 282, 283, 288–290
57–59, 245 OTT Video, 9, 48, 88, 89, 93, 101
 INDEX 327

Ownership, 9, 29, 30, 38, 43, 45, 60, ride hailing platforms, 11, 177–195
70, 92, 111, 115, 122, 140, 177, social media platforms, 30, 157,
179, 185–186, 193–195, 232, 161, 188, 221–234, 239
234, 241–243, 266, 277, streaming platforms, 52, 89, 90, 99,
283, 295 107, 113–115, 117, 118,
OYO, 7, 29, 31 120–124, 145
super platforms, 44, 48, 59, 60
taxi platforms, 26, 29,
P 177, 179–181
Parthasarathi, Vibodh, 2, 6, 8, 13, 15, Policing, 16
26, 50, 54, 60, 77, 107, 110, Policy, 2, 8, 47, 51–53, 57, 58, 80,
155, 249 112, 115, 117, 121, 124, 145,
Participation, 38, 164, 230, 240, 253 147, 156, 167, 183, 194, 195,
Patanjali, 283, 290–292 203, 204, 209, 212, 214, 224,
Patronage, 27, 46–48, 241, 272, 273 229, 242
Payments, 12, 26, 27, 38, 57, 75, 76, Politicians, 45, 46, 77, 81, 161, 163,
120, 165, 181, 185, 186, 189, 223, 225, 227, 234, 241, 251
190, 244, 247, 250 Politics, 284, 286, 291, 296, 301,
PayTM, 3, 12, 27, 32, 76, 79, 83, 302, 305, 310–313
115, 208, 247, 250 biopolitics, 299, 300, 309
Platform capitalism, see Capitalism electoral politics, 34
Platform economy, 1–17 geopolitics, 44
See also Economy Hindutva politics, 286, 291, 301
Platformisation, 1–17, 25, 49, 108, political class, 157
120, 121, 124, 225, political connections, 55, 60
261–278, 281–297 political imperatives, 29, 281
Platforms political reality, 282
advertising platforms, 28, 29 subaltern politics, 312
cloud platforms, 29 Polity, 39, 74, 77
global platforms, 7, 25, 48, 89 Poor, see Poverty
hotel platforms, 7, 29, 31 Popular, 5, 9, 10, 12, 26, 76,
industrial platforms, 29 78–83, 88, 97, 100, 114, 118,
lean platforms, 29 146, 157, 212, 225–227, 265,
mobile platforms, 4, 11, 222, 269, 272, 273, 275–278, 287,
225, 227 301, 303
music platforms, 9, 88, 91, 108, Population, 5, 14, 31–33, 80, 112,
109, 114–122 202, 209, 224, 230, 233, 234,
payment platforms, 12 244, 252, 256, 262, 301
platform architecture, 35, 244, 313 Populism, 249, 312
platform ecosphere, 87–103 Poverty, 32, 46, 74, 184, 193, 202,
platform operators, 4, 16, 33, 59, 210, 212, 244, 252, 306
148, 177, 178 Pricing, 12, 32, 68, 90, 135, 136,
platform services, 10, 37, 89, 180 181, 247
platform systems, 267 Privacy, 15, 34, 118, 167, 168,
product platforms, 29, 206 201–208, 210, 213–215
328 INDEX

Private sector, 10, 11, 16, 24, 33, R

34, 55, 93, 201–206, Rai, Amit, 17, 25, 33, 301, 305, 306,
209–211, 215 308, 311
Privatization, 94, 140, 284 Ramdev, Baba, 283, 290, 291, 295
Processes Ratings mechanisms, 195
alchemical processes, 28, 69 Real estate, 16, 290
algorithmic processes, 72, 153, 180 Reciprocity, 38
collective processes, 310 Regionalism, 249
datalogical processes, 301, 305, Regulation
306, 308, 309, 311–313 regulatory bodies, 15, 47, 195
economic processes, 6, 12, 16, 39 regulatory loopholes, 25, 52
evolutionary processes, 34–37 Reliance
jugaad processes, 310 Reliance Communications
Production, 10, 27, 33, 35, 36, 38, (RComm), 53, 55
43, 44, 51, 60, 68, 70, 72, 79, Reliance Industries Limited (RIL),
88, 93, 96–98, 100, 102, 107, 3, 37, 38, 47, 48, 52,
109–113, 116–118, 120–122, 56, 59, 137
124, 131, 134, 135, 137, Reliance Jio, 3, 32, 37, 39, 47, 48,
145–147, 153–158, 160–162, 53, 55, 59, 75, 93, 109, 112,
164, 169, 171, 172, 180, 185, 114, 121, 136–138, 245,
228, 242, 248, 252, 262–265, 247, 248
269–271, 273, 275, 292, Religion, 281–297
300, 304–306 Christianity, 282, 285, 293
Profit, 28–30, 32, 33, 38, 46, 48, 50, devotion, 286
52, 60, 69, 74, 119, 120, 123, Hinduism, 281–297
130, 143, 157, 165, 170, 179, Islam, 285, 293
184, 193, 194, 203, 208, 234, material religion, 284, 285
257, 309 religious goods, 282
Protocols, 25, 28, 204, 300 religious organizations, 294
Public, 6, 7, 10, 11, 13, 16, 24, 31, religious practice, 13,
36, 45–47, 55, 69, 70, 73–76, 287–289, 291
80, 82, 83, 93, 97, 108, 147, religious rituals, 284
155, 158, 161, 165, 169, 170, religious services, 283, 289,
179, 188, 190, 202, 203, 205, 290, 295
206, 208, 210, 211, 213–215, religious worship, 282
222, 223, 228, 231–234, 240, Remediation, 5, 108, 153, 287, 289
241, 243, 245, 248, 249, 251, Remuneration, 121, 122, 124
253, 257, 265, 271, 276, 303 Rents, 14, 29, 31–33, 46, 47, 52, 185,
Public sector, 5, 11, 15, 16, 186, 277, 304, 309
55, 75, 193 Reserve Bank of India (RBI),
Public sphere, 35, 222, 224–226, 233, 56, 57, 193
234, 249, 272 Resources, 10, 12, 14, 16, 29, 46, 56,
Purification, 15, 256 57, 80, 110, 146, 156, 163, 177,
 INDEX 329

179, 185–187, 193–195, 204, Shah, Amit, 247, 253, 255

214, 225, 248, 276, 302, 303 Shareholders, 55, 241
Retail, 8, 9, 23–25, 27, 30, 37, 39, 59, Sharing, 13, 14, 27, 74, 81, 97, 120,
74, 76, 88, 91, 262, 263, 265, 164, 166, 171, 179, 215, 225,
266, 274, 294 226, 229–231, 233, 263, 266,
Revenues, 8, 14, 27, 29, 31, 48, 53, 267, 269, 270, 302
59, 72, 79, 80, 90, 93, 111, Shutdowns, 16, 168, 169
113–115, 117, 120–124, 133, Signal flows, 8
135, 138, 164, 170, 232, Silicon Valley, 2, 11, 15
268–270, 275, 277, 291 Singapore, 142, 286
Rhetoric, 2, 69–74, 80, 82 Singh, Pawan, 17
Ride hailing platforms (RHPs), 11, Skype, 206, 288, 289
12, 177–195 Smart cities, 5, 11, 93
Rights, 3, 16, 32, 37, 48, 57, 81, 96, Smartphones, 5, 11, 26, 93, 108, 112,
111, 116, 117, 119, 120, 122, 118, 119, 138, 181, 225, 242,
123, 135, 136, 148, 202–205, 243, 248
208, 209, 213–215, 232, 243, Smart technologies, 2
275, 290, 295, 303 SMS, 251
Risk, 9, 16, 50, 70–73, 81, 122, 130, Sociability, 1, 6, 7, 13, 14, 30, 38,
179, 195, 239–257, 263, 271 206, 270, 297
Rodrigues, Usha, 17, 29, 222, 223, Socialisation, 229
227, 231, 234 Softbank, 3, 32
Software, 10, 11, 29, 31, 111, 113,
131, 155, 158, 165, 168, 172,
S 183, 212, 262, 267, 305
Saavn, 9, 114, 117–121, 124, 247 Sony, 9, 110, 124, 144
Sachetization, 240–246, 254, 256 SonyLIV, 9, 134, 137
Scrutiny, 9, 213, 255 Southeast Asia, 7
SD cards, 93 Sovereignty, 24, 204, 214, 275
Security, 11, 14, 27, 30, 69, 181, 193, Spectrum, 15, 26, 32, 46, 52, 56, 57,
203, 205, 212, 214, 215, 250, 72, 222, 243, 244, 252, 254,
255, 256, 263, 275, 305, 308–311 269, 291
Servants, 14, 46 Speculation, 50, 54, 69, 70
Services, 2, 3, 7–12, 14–16, 24–26, Spending, 5, 134, 167, 186,
28–31, 35–38, 48, 52, 53, 59, 192, 226
68, 75, 76, 87–95, 98–101, 103, Spotify, 115, 117, 124
108, 109, 111–117, 119–121, Srnicek, Nick, 4, 28–30, 33, 38,
131, 133–137, 143, 146, 157, 132, 179, 202,
165, 177–184, 187, 189–192, 303–305, 308–310
194, 195, 203, 204, 206–209, Stack, 31, 34, 245–249, 257
211, 212, 224–226, 228, 229, Stakeholders, 74, 88, 113, 177–180,
232, 234, 244, 246, 263, 267, 195, 207, 210, 273
268, 270, 272, 276, 277, Standardization, 8, 23, 117, 122, 180,
281–284, 288–290, 292, 295, 195, 240–246
304, 307–310, 312 Startups, 14, 207
330 INDEX

Streaming, 48, 89–92, 94, 100, Telecoms

107–125, 129, 133, 134, mobile telecoms, 3, 10, 47, 52, 136
274, 277 telecom sector, 8, 9
Subaltern Studies, 306 Telecom service providers (TSPs), 48,
Subjectivity, 157 53, 92, 94, 225, 245
Subjects, 24, 78, 165, 172, 202, 205, Television
208, 209, 244, 254, 265 cable television, 8, 9, 53, 54, 291
Subscribers, 37, 48, 53, 68, 90–92, DTH television, 53, 75, 89, 93
95, 101, 115, 119, 122, 136, NaMo TV, 32, 79
137, 207–209, 212, 213, 225 NDTV, 241, 243, 244, 251,
Subscription, 8, 30, 31, 52, 87, 90, 254, 255
94, 95, 112, 114, 118, 119, 133, Network 18, 247
135, 138, 224, 225, 233, 246, Republic TV, 251
247, 268–271 satellite television, 8
Subscription video on demand Tencent, 44, 58, 119, 145
(SVOD), 9, 88–90, 92–96, 99, Territoriality, 32
100, 102, 103, 144 Thomas, Pradip, 2, 13, 17, 94, 99
Sulekha, 308–310 Time
Supreme Court, 202–207, diachronic time, 157
209–213, 290 reflexive time, 157
Surveillance, 16, 38, 76, 80, 202–209, synchronic time, 157
211, 214, 247 Times Music, 110, 112, 116
Swadeshi, 290 Tiwary, Ishita, 17
Swiggy, 12 Traders, 33, 50
Transactions
digital transactions, 5, 12, 72,
T 76, 83, 243
Tamil, 154 financial transactions, 140, 244
Tamil Nadu, 161, 245, 286 political transactions, 37
Tariffs, 52, 115, 135, 136, 138, social transactions, 24
242, 246 transactional layer, 24, 31, 32, 34
Tata, 10, 11, 245, 248 transactional records, 33
Tax, 5, 12, 31, 37, 55, 99, 179, 205 transaction costs, 36, 244
Taxis, 26, 29, 178, 180–182, 184, Transparency, 50, 60, 179, 242
186, 187, 191, 193, 195 Trolls, 78, 224, 252, 255, 283
Technology Trump, Donald, 79, 80, 242, 249
digital technology, 10, 36, 78, 88, Trust, 56, 57, 180, 190, 204, 210,
108, 112, 113, 118, 131, 133, 211, 214, 226, 232–234, 257
154, 155, 169, 171, 256, 271 T-Series, 3, 91, 96, 110, 116, 117,
giants, 2 123, 124
media technology, 169, 206, Twitter, 13, 69, 72, 82, 112, 154,
234, 271 156, 161, 162, 165, 169, 170,
smart technology, 2 223–228, 230, 231, 242,
Telecom Regulatory Authority of India 250, 251
(TRAI), 57, 58, 93, 241, 242 Typology, 29, 30, 38, 228
 INDEX 331

U 160, 164, 165, 171, 225–227,

Uber, 7, 12, 14, 74–76, 80, 177, 180, 230, 250, 262, 266, 267,
182, 185, 289, 304 269–271, 273–275, 277
UFO Moviez, 9, 29 Video compact discs (VCD), 262,
UN Conference on Trade and 266, 269, 270, 274
Development (UNCTAD), Villages, 13, 26, 27, 34, 240,
44, 48, 59 272, 273
UNESCO, 108, 121 Vodafone, 53, 87, 94, 95, 109, 113,
United Kingdom (UK), 7, 111, 114, 137, 245, 247
147, 309 Vodafone Idea, 55, 245
United Nation (UN), 44
United State (US), 3, 14, 44–46,
58–60, 93, 95, 96, 101, 114, W
134, 139, 146, 147, 239, 302 Walmart, 3, 25, 57, 59, 90
UrbanClap, 26 Websites, 7, 13, 80, 98, 120,
Users, 3, 4, 7, 9–13, 15, 16, 28–32, 154–156, 160–162, 164–166,
34–38, 54, 58, 72, 74, 83, 91–93, 169, 170, 212, 225, 248,
95, 103, 112, 115, 118–120, 291–294, 309
133, 144, 157, 158, 160, Web 2.0, 27, 31, 92
162–166, 170, 171, 180, 191, Welfare, 15, 16, 202–206, 211,
203, 204, 206–208, 210, 211, 214, 215
223, 225, 226, 228–231, 242, WhatsApp, 3, 13, 16, 26, 34, 35,
246, 248, 250, 267, 268, 271, 73–75, 78, 82, 156, 161, 163,
274, 275, 295, 296, 304, 169, 171, 212, 221, 224–226,
305, 309 229–231, 234, 239, 246, 290,
experience, 34, 35 295, 296, 302, 312
Uttar Pradesh, 187, 262, 273, 296 The Wire, 241, 243, 252, 254, 255
Work, see Labour
Wynk, 114
V
Value
chain, 29, 44, 52, 59 Y
derivative values, 67–83 YouTube, 9, 26, 36, 87, 90, 97, 98,
valuation, 68, 70–72, 77, 81–83, 112, 115, 116, 120, 154, 161,
131, 133, 138, 290 169, 171, 223–229, 240, 252,
Vectors, 8, 14, 16, 17, 24, 25, 43, 68, 253, 264, 268–271, 273, 275,
132, 146, 147, 309, 311, 312 277, 307
Vendors, 76, 185, 267, 273, 274
Verification, 74, 202–204, 206, 207,
210, 231–233 Z
Viability, 68 ZEE, 146
Video, 6, 9, 37, 48, 69, 73, 82, Zomato, 12, 26, 76
87–103, 119, 131, 133, 146, Zuckerberg, Mark, 37