It is still early in the morning when Shanti’s* phone buzzes, even before she has left the house after wrapping up her own exhausting household “duties”. There is a notification from a domestic work platform on the screen: a two-hour cleaning job beginning at 9 am in Hiranandani Powai, one of Mumbai’s most affluent neighbourhoods. The app does not say what needs to be done–no details about the house, the number of rooms, or the kind of cleaning that is expected. For a moment, she hesitates, but then accepts. Too many rejections and the work stops coming.
Shanti has never visited the area but estimates the journey from her home in an informal settlement near Ghatkopar will take at least an hour. She walks the 5 km distance, though the trip takes longer than expected. Avoiding the congestion on the main road, she cuts across the small hill between Ghatkopar and Chandivali toward Powai, passing a labour naka-like gathering point where workers assemble each morning to report to a male team leader.
By the time Shanti arrives, she is exhausted. Inside, the job bears little resemblance to the app’s description of basic cleaning—“sweeping, mopping, dusting”. Dirty dishes are piled up in the sink, the bathroom needs scrubbing, and the floors are caked with grime. There is no way to renegotiate the task or extend the booking without jeopardising the next one. The time slot is fixed, even if the workload is not.
She works faster, keeping one eye on the clock. When she leaves, she does not know what rating she will receive, only that it matters. Before she reaches the gate, another job notification flashes on her phone.
Shanti, a mother of three school-going children in her 40s, joined a domestic work platform in April 2024 after a recruitment campaign for domestic workers in her chawl. The company promised earnings nearly three times higher than those in conventional domestic work. She was initially offered Rs 75 per hour. A year later, another worker I interviewed reported earning Rs 125 per hour on the same platform.
Shanti’s experience denotes a broader shift in how domestic work is organised and mediated today in Indian cities, through apps and algorithms.
When I began my PhD research on domestic work in 2023, fully developed on-demand platforms had yet to emerge. Beyond a few experimental start-ups, such as Beegle in Bengaluru and MaidHub in Pune, the platform sector remained largely organised through more conventional intermediaries – placement agencies, website-based services, and telephone networks. My research therefore focused on broadly conceived labour intermediaries. Historically, such intermediaries have done far more than just match workers with employers. They have played a central role in governing labour, shaping workers’ mobility, social reproduction, and everyday lives.
The year 2024 marked a turning point in the platformisation of domestic work. Backed by fresh venture capital, a new generation of on-demand platforms—including Snabbit, Urban Company’s InstaHelp, and later Pronto—entered the sector. Just six months into my fieldwork, the landscape had shifted dramatically. Major platform firms launched pilot projects in affluent Mumbai neighbourhoods such as Hiranandani, Powai. Yet their operations remained tentative, hampered by difficulties in recruiting workers and building a stable customer base.
The situation was different in Bengaluru. Earlier bootstrapped platforms such as Beegle and Broomies had already expanded beyond established neighbourhoods like Jayanagar and JP Nagar into newer growth corridors such as Electronic City and Varthur. Interviews with workers on these platforms painted a more nuanced picture than dominant critiques of platform labour suggest. Most spoke positively of the apps, citing significantly higher earnings. Although formal protections were minimal, features such as credit advances, uniforms, fixed schedules, and what workers described as “permanent jobs” offered a sense of stability, recognition, and dignity often absent in traditional domestic work.
By 2025, it was clear that platforms were becoming more than a new hiring mechanism. They were increasingly shaping how domestic workers moved through the city, organised their time, interacted with clients, and understood the possibilities of their work.
This account, however, remains partial. It is based on workers’ narratives and limited by what they chose—or were able—to share. Much of the labour that sustains these lives, especially the forms of care, negotiation, and social reproduction that occur beyond the platform interface, remains difficult to capture even through long-term ethnographic research.