One night at around 2 am this past January, Uber driver Priyanka Devi was on her way to pick up a passenger in the Kashmiri Gate area in Delhi. While she waited for the passenger, a brick came through her car window. Two men attacked her, trying to grab her phone and demanding she hand over her keys. When she resisted, one of them slashed her neck with a broken beer bottle. The men fled when a passerby approached, taking with them her day’s earnings and leaving Devi, 31, bleeding by the roadside. Devi said she tried calling Uber and used an SOS button in her car. “I called them [Uber] so many times,” she says. “They responded to me a few days later, only after this incident made it to local news.”
(Uber India spokesperson Ruchica Tomar says that they reached out to Devi as soon as they were made aware of the incident. The Uber app has an “in-app emergency button through which the driver can directly call the local police,” Tomar says, adding that Uber’s records show Devi didn’t use it after her attack.)
One week after Devi was attacked, Mohammed Rizwan, a 23-year-old in Hyderabad, was attacked by a customer’s pet dog while delivering a food order for delivery platform Swiggy. To save himself, Rizwan jumped from a third floor balcony. He was taken to the hospital, but died a few days later. In the same city, Y. Venkatesh, a driver for the Ola ride-hailing service, has been in a coma since last year, after being beaten by the friends of a passenger who refused to pay his fare.
Just this month, platform drivers complained about being harassed—and even assaulted—by security staff at Mumbai airport, in the western part of India. Drivers in the east Indian city of Guwahati filed complaints of being robbed by fraudsters posing as customers. And in a gruesome incident down south, a customer allegedly killed a delivery agent when he couldn’t pay for the iPhone he ordered online. Reports say he kept the corpse with him for at least three days before disposing of it.
Gig work in India is dangerous. A review of local news reports across the country shows at least a dozen such attacks over the past few months. WIRED spoke to 50 people working for ride-hailing and food delivery services; roughly half of them said they have been attacked on the job—some because customers refused to pay; others because of their caste or religion. The numbers reflect a rising trend of violence against platform workers in India. The Center for Internet and Society, a think tank, surveyed 1,500 gig workers last year, and found that one in three said they fear theft or physical assault at work.
“For one in three people while going to work fearing that they might be robbed today or face physical assault is alarmingly high,” Aayush Rathi, research lead at CIS, says.
While instances of rogue customer behavior and carjacking are common in the US and other countries, the power imbalances in Indian society due to class and caste divides create a potentially toxic environment for platform workers.
The gig workforce in India has expanded rapidly in recent years. NITI Aayog, the Indian government’s public policy think tank, estimates that there may be more than 23 million gig workers in the country by 2030, more than three times the number at the start of the decade. The growth of this cohort, who lack stable jobs, social protections, and access to collective bargaining, intersects with India’s other social fractures, exacerbating their precarity and disempowerment.