I see my role as a filmmaker in Beyond Ratings as a curious collaborator and an app user wanting to understand the gap between technology and workers, to document and preserve their resilience in the online labor landscape. Smartphone technology has created opportunities for all class groups, across regions and has even lured migrants from towns and villages in India to metro cities, to find their working identities. Working outside of domestic spaces as gig workers, such as beauticians, drivers and delivery persons, has given women migrants too the confidence to survive on their own. Within this context, looking at the changing reality of labor landscape and the ambition of women to work remain central to the making of this film.

My research was shaped through newspaper readings and collaboration. Despite a plethora of news articles on the exploitation of gig-workers, the issue seemed to fall on deaf ears. I found my access to women who shared the failure of flexible work hours, limited access to bosses, vulnerability with customers, and more. With my camera, I began to watch the app world not as a customer but from the point of view of the workers, particularly women workers. The crisis seemed personal the more I met women workers on this side of the world. I wondered about the visibility of their gendered issues. I realised that the challenges faced by women workers were layered and more complex given the amount of gig work they tried to balance with their unshared domestic responsibilities and at-home oppressions that included bread-earning, violent partners or single women raising children.

The form of the film emerged when women started interacting with the camera. I wanted to follow the perspectives of women, to give them the agency to represent their experiences and allow their subjectivities to reflect a macro story. As such, the film became my first collaborative effort.

My relationship with the app world was limited to ordering, booking and occasionally rating rude male drivers. With my process, I watched the online landscape differently and saw a huge part of India living and surviving with online work. And I saw myself as a customer, deeply unaware of the lives beyond. I started questioning the ethics of the platforms we depend so heavily on and wondered if the convenience of our lives came at the cost of workers’ identities.