India has been witnessing one of the largest increases in privately-held wealth relative to public wealth in the world throughout history. According to the most recent World Inequality Report, India is one of the most unequal countries, in terms of wealth and income, in the world. This concerning trend is accelerating in the push towards platformization of everyday life. From communications to transportation to doing groceries, domestic and international corporations have been heavily invested in monopolizing the markets—a dynamic that induces greater concentration of wealth and income in fewer hands, and decreases democratic accountability of platform-based services, which are rapidly becoming essential. 

India also has one of the largest cooperative networks in the world. Cooperativism carves out an opening within capitalist-dominated markets for workers (and users and other stakeholders) to democratically control their conditions of work, and enforce the equitable distribution of the wealth and income resulting from their labor. India’s cooperatives, initially a product of British colonialists and mired in contestations over state and political stewardship, are heavily concentrated in the largest sectors of its unequal economy—agriculture, credit provision, and the dominant informal sector at large. With platformization, these sectors are undoing a massive overhaul as more and more sectors become increasingly informalized (free from the already weak labor regulations), increasing worker precarity, and as the unequal dynamics of these sectors are crystallized in through the algorithmic control of these newly introduced digital platforms. 

Within this context, there are also a number of initiatives that are challenging this concerning status quo and channeling the platformization in a cooperative direction, where the workers and users can democratically own and govern the platforms through which their lives are becoming more dependent on. ‘Platform cooperatives’ bring the cooperative model to the digital platform, and provide a democratic alternative to the authoritarian dynamics of corporate-run digital infrastructure. From thinks tanks to government initiatives to platform co-op start-ups mushrooming across the country, there is an incipient and growing movement in this direction. 

This report is a preliminary look into the growing threads of this movement. While the actual application of democratic principles is not as prevalent as the cooperatives themselves, this familiarity is beneficial for future development and experimentation. Second, these sectors have been the focus of an intensive digitization drive spearheaded by the Indian government, as evidenced by the proliferation of various projects aimed at this end across the country. These industries will undergo significant digitization in the coming years, and it is at this early stage of change that platform cooperatives can take the lead. 

While this website contains most of our research results, you can download the entire report here.