5. Making Overall Sense of the E-commerce Hype
by Rahul Varman, email: rahulv[at]iitk.ac.in
We would like to end by emphasising five significant points for further consideration.
- Corporatisation-Monopolisation of Disaggregated Services through Information Technology
As is evident from the discussion above we can see rapid consolidation and monopolisation under a handful of corporates, disingenuously called ‘start-ups’, of widely spread and decentralised services such as retail and taxis, as well as many other such services: hotels, ticketing, etc. With large scale evictions from land and migration from the countryside, very little employment generation in large scale manufacturing, and a deepening crisis in small scale manufacturing, and a considerable slowdown in construction and mining, there is an acute scarcity of employment. Services such as petty transport and retailhave been a residual source of some kind of employment For instance, in Kanpur, a very large number of those who were rendered unemployed by the closure of the textile mills have ended up as auto rickshaw drivers, cycle rickshaw operators or salesmen/shopkeepers. As consolidation and monopolisation happens in such services, capital intensity is bound to increase, much like what we have seen in manufacturing sector since the industrial revolution, closing the avenues of even such menial employment for a large set of people in a populous country like India. Already the likes of Uber and Google are making heavy investments for development of driverless/self-driving cars, and Amazon is making heavy investments towards robotisation of its warehouses and using drones for deliveries. BBC,[1] in a recent post, elaborates on Uber’s point of view: “But Uber’s big inconvenience is the fact it needs drivers, and so this line of research is about eliminating that final piece of the puzzle to boost profits even more (emphasis added).” (more…)