Actor-director Nandita Das, on Saturday, said India’s fast-growing convenience economy is built on “deeply unequal” structures that expose gig workers to risk, insecurity and loss of dignity, even as consumers are increasingly pampered by app-based platforms.
Speaking at the Kolkata Literary Meet alongside journalist-author Vandana Vasudevan, and moderated by Mitakshara Kumari, Das said her film Zwigato emerged from observing how delivery workers live under constant pressure from ratings and algorithms.
“He was five minutes late and apologising as if I had the power to destroy him,” she said, recalling an interaction with a delivery agent during the pandemic. “That anxiety stayed with me. It told me this is a story of our times.”
Das said working-class protagonists have “vanished from our collective narratives”, even though gig workers form the backbone of the digital economy. “They are called partners, but they are anything but partners,” she said. “Behind all the digital dazzle is human labour.”
Vasudevan said doorstep delivery has normalised “extreme passivity” among consumers. “You just sit and tap a few keys and things magically arrive, like a genie,” she said. “No distance is too long, no task too trivial and no worker too harassed in the service of consumption.”
Referring to the recent nationwide strike by gig workers, Vasudevan said the protests reflected years of accumulated frustration. “Workers are saying very clearly that the entire income cannot be variable and unpredictable,” she said. “Somebody has to pay for convenience, and right now it is always the worker.”
The strike, held across several cities in late December, saw delivery partners from major food and quick-commerce platforms demand safer working conditions, minimum pay guarantees and social security, while opposing ultra-fast delivery timelines.
Das linked the controversy around 10-minute deliveries to rising risk on the roads. “If you are faster, you get more orders. If you sit idle, you are punished,” she said. “So you are incentivising people to risk their lives. Even if you remove the words ‘10 minutes’ from advertising, the pressure doesn’t disappear.”
Vasudevan said the problem lies in the design of platforms. “The customer is god, the company cannot lose money, so somebody has to absorb the shock,” she said. “That shock is absorbed by the worker.”
Das said inequality has been normalised to such an extent that people often do not see their own behaviour as unkind. “We don’t even think about it,” she said. “We feel entitled to give one star, as if it’s a small thing. But that one star can change someone’s life.”
Vasudevan pointed to information asymmetry as a structural issue. “You know everything about the driver — his rating, his car, how many trips he has done,” she said. “He knows nothing about you. That imbalance is built into the system.”
Both speakers said regulation has lagged behind technology. “By the time governments wake up, the model has already changed,” Vasudevan said, adding that recent labour codes and curbs on promised delivery timelines were steps forward but insufficient.
Das said films and books can play a role in forcing consumers to reflect. “This film is not for the platforms or the workers — they know their lives,” she said. “It is for people like us, to recognise that we are not passive, and that we are complicit in this inequality.”