These issues again reiterate the point that the agrarian question in India is a critical part of the development of the capitalism in India because of the disproportionate land holdings within Indian agrarian capitalism (Patnaik, 1986). The present characteristics of capitalism in India, including platform capitalism, draw its most important qualities from the historical trajectory of capitalist development in India determined by colonial exploitation (Bagchi, 1988; Blaut, 1989) which has facilitated a process of capitalist development based on the transplantation of western capitalist modes of production in India and not in accordance with the specific localised contradictions that capital faces in India (Maitra, 1989). Through a constant reduction of welfare schemes, and a growing domination of the market, successive Indian governments have created a state of primitive exploitation for the people in India’s hinterlands. The introduction of new technology—the fetish with which had begun most prominently during Rajiv Gandhi’s tenure as the Indian Prime Minister— 19 affected the ways in which individuals analysed their possibilities of upward or downward by changing the overall income distribution and the general cost of labour in the society (Harriss-White, 2011) which always has an effect on the socially necessary labour time the key element in the exploitation of labour power and in the social construction of norms surrounding the working day (Marx, 1867/1976).
5 MIGRANT GIG WORKERS OF INDIA’S CONSUMERIST CITIES
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<sup>18</sup> For example, one of the major reasons for the success of Amazon is its focus on micro-tasking, whereby a very elaborate and detailed division of labor exists between the technical workers, the warehouse workers and the delivery workers, which makes the process faster and more seamless.