© Priya Narayanan, Assistant Professor of Marketing, IIM Kozhikode. Views are personal.

Before I begin this post, let me confess that I use Ola once in a while. In fact, I was sitting in an Ola cab at a traffic jam when the scene I am about to narrate happened. The vehicle in front of me was a medium-sized truck, and from the exterior it was clear that this truck carried garbage. In that case, why did I give it a second glance? Because there was a man inside! In the garbage part of the van (not the driver side which I anyway couldn’t see), beside the pile of black garbage bags with their mouths tied, this lanky guy stood bent over, his jeans pushed up to his knees, his hands working furiously. He picked out mineral water bottles – the smaller kind that we usually see at parties and throw away so casually – and dropped them into a big grayish bag. Each time he saw water in a bottle, he would pour it on his feet and wipe it down (to cool the heat of standing the entire time in that airless shaking truck?). What he didn’t pick from the black bag were largely paper plates and paper cups, most having some leftovers, so the waste was probably from a party. This activity went on even as the signal changed to green.

Despite all the cynicism that India’s cities (Gurgaon, Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, and Noida) have taught me, and despite being told that “this is how the lower classes live, what is your problem, isn’t the AC in your cab running?”, I was shocked. Right in front of me stood a guy who made a living sorting out plastic bottles from garbage, standing inside a moving truck. It made me wonder: is there anything that any of us, seeing and then quickly unseeing the reality in front of us, can do? It might help to segregate waste so that workers like him do not have to repeatedly dip their hands into garbage to retrieve bottles. But segregation would relieve him of his job! Imagine we all decided to segregate our plastic and paper and wet waste. What would happen to our waste workers?

Which then brings us to the question of workers. And the role of entrepreneurship. What we need today are companies that can employ people. Taking what is there, mixing and matching it and making money in the middle is nice only for the money-makers, the ones who use the system to their advantage. If ever capitalism is to become worth the praise it often gathers, that would be when the capitalist outlook benefits the lower classes.

Ola and its like seem to focus on milking the market from both ends for as long as possible, with no consideration towards passengers (give them a taxi if available, otherwise let them keep trying!) or taxi drivers (make them compete). I do not imply that these companies turn into social enterprises, for they might then lose their momentum. But it would be socially and economically useful to see companies solving the real problem of unemployment by creating new jobs. Which is why Swiggy gets my vote, because, despite all its flaws (making people eat more of restaurant food, draining their pockets and making them unhealthy), it seems to create food delivery jobs where none existed before. Now, if Ola has made new people learn driving and come into the system, my criticism stands invalid and I would be the happier for that.