The Union Budget’s announcement of social security and healthcare benefits for platform-based gig workers has sparked criticism from workers, who see it as simply a quick fix to avoid addressing the deeper, more pressing demands for employment regulation and collective bargaining rights. Take a closer look at the situations in which the gig economy is booming today, and it would be clear how people seeking jobs have little choice but to fall into its grasp. In this context, the Malayalam film Baakki Vannavar (or The Leftovers) offers a potent lens to explore the intersection of youth unemployment and the gig economy—a concern that the Union government has completely evaded.
Baakki Vannavar, directed by Amal Prasi and featuring Salmanul in the lead role, is acclaimed mainly as a film about the everyday life of a delivery worker employed by a food delivery platform in Kochi, Kerala. However, the movie should not be reduced to the everydayness of an individual doing a specific job. Its scope is much broader, serving as a cinematic social and political commentary on the structural problems of our economy, such as uneven development and jobless growth. The struggles faced by platform-based gig workers, which the film appears to focus on, are symptomatic of macroeconomic issues and cannot simply be seen as the problem of digital labour platforms alone.
A significant portion of the movie takes place in two settings. One is on the roads, where the main protagonist is out making deliveries, capturing the everyday struggles of platform-based food delivery workers, such as long waiting hours, excessive working hours, and friction with customers. It also touches upon the challenges that arise due to the city/town being their workplace, such as health and safety risks, traffic, exposure to harsh weather conditions, vehicle maintenance, and the lack of restrooms and primary health infrastructure.
The other setting is a college hostel where the protagonist stays during his studies and goes to meet his friends. The scenes from the hostel rooms and premises are crucial for our analysis of the film, as they locate the characters portrayed, shedding light on their vulnerabilities, struggles, and aspirations, pointing to the multiplier effect of social position on economic hardships.
The protagonist and his friends come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds and are depicted as first-generation learners. For them, education is the only way out of the vicious cycle of poverty they have been trapped in for generations. Thus, acquiring education becomes a driving force for their upward social and economic mobility. Unlike students from relatively well-off backgrounds, they must constantly trade their aspirations with the burden of responsibility. The film reflects the harsh reality of where they end up, despite their best efforts and struggles. Throughout the movie, these youths grapple with uncertainty about their futures, highlighting systemic issues that leave a generation of aspiring individuals in limbo. They are burdened by unfulfilled dreams, financial hardship, and a sense of hopelessness. After completing their college education, they find themselves stuck in a loop between hopes for a better life and the struggle to make ends meet.
Watch a teaser for the film:
Zooming out from the movie, these youth represent those who bear the cost of our economy’s systemic failure to ensure better living and economic conditions for its citizens. The central themes of the movie—which it established through various interconnected narratives and subplots—reflect the questions gripping the Indian economy in the neoliberal period. These include the unemployment crisis in general, particularly among educated youth, unstable incomes, a lack of decent jobs, the commodification of education and housing, the absence of basic entitlements, growing inequality, the financialisation of precarity, and the debt trap.
The youth employment crisis is the most prominent subplot in the movie. According to the Youth at a Glance Report 2021 by the Ministry of Statistics and Program Implementation (MoSPI), Government of India, labour force participation among the 15-29 age group was only 41.4%. This means that only two out of five young people were actively seeking a job. The film, released in 2022, highlights this low labour force participation through its characters, who represent the remaining three out of five. They sit idly in their hostel rooms, conversing about the reality outside the university campus or the grim job market, or lying down scrolling through their phones out of desperation. They are discouraged workers who have given up their active job search. As seen in the film, repeated rejection, cancellation of rank lists, a lack of confidence, and frustration discourage them from actively searching for jobs.
The movie outlines how the failure of the government to generate employment opportunities and the lack of decent and fair jobs in the local economy put these recently-graduated youth in the trap of long waiting lists for government jobs, customer service, or other low-paid service sector jobs. Some of them, including the protagonist, are on the rank list for a government job but are frustrated by the impending cancellation of the list. Others prepare for government competitive exams with little hope of success. Up to 15.7% of India’s educated youth are grappling with this unemployment and/or underemployment crisis, according to the estimates of the World Bank in 2023. This growing problem fuels increased demand for precarious employment, such as platform-based gig work.
It is an accepted thesis among heterodox economists that the low unemployment rate in developing countries like India, compared to developed countries, is because the population cannot afford to remain unemployed. As per the India Employment Report of 2024, self-employment accounted for more than half of total employment in India in 2022. Upon closer examination, a large portion of this is non-traditional self-employment, such as platform work.
The protagonist in Baakki Vannavar represents these workers, for whom selling their labour only supports their daily sustenance. Though exploitation occurs indirectly by the ones using their labour, at its face, it is made to look like self-exploitation. The protagonist finds himself in platform-based delivery work, which enables platform capital to extract maximum surplus value from workers under the guise of flexibility and self-employment, while also facilitating wage theft and indirect control over the labour process through the rating system. Here, the labour surplus is appropriated by the platform company, yet the workers are labelled as “partners” or “contract workers.”
Meanwhile, through the NITI Aayog Report of 2022, the government has supported and testified to the growth of the platform economy as a booming sector capable of generating more jobs. In doing so, the government is institutionalising these precarious jobs as a solution to the unemployment crisis, leading to further informalisation of the economy and casualisation of work.
This is reflected in the movie, where two characters, outside an MNC office, discuss the exploitation and low salaries they receive, touching on the broader issue of contractualisation and casualisation of work in the economy. The neoliberal shift in the labour market, where more people move into self-employment, particularly non-traditional self-employment like platform-based gig work, “blurs the distinction between employed and unemployed.” Economist Prabhat Patnaik refers to this phenomenon as “employment or work rationing,” where workers are more likely to end up in insecure forms of employment like gig and platform work rather than remain fully unemployed. He attributes this to “unfettered capitalism” in the neoliberal period.
Another striking sub-plot in the movie involves the protagonist and a friend visiting an agency that has advertised scholarships to study abroad. They are told that the scholarships are limited and hard to obtain. The agency offers them a deal for an educational loan or a land mortgage, which they both do not have and cannot afford. The movie portrays how the Indian youth perceive the opportunity to go abroad to study in hope for better employment opportunities. However, this aspiration requires significant financial investment, which, as discussed in the movie, needs crores of investment—a luxury only those from well-off backgrounds can afford. By depicting this, the movie comments on the political economy of high-scale student migration from Kerala to foreign countries for higher education, while also implying the need for quality, affordable public education within the state.
The movie also touches upon other issues that affect the lower-middle- and lower-income groups, such as the financialisation of precarity and the housing crises. Their life conditions are entangled within these financial systems, leading them into debt traps. In one scene, a friend of the protagonist receives a notification about the protagonist’s overdue payments on an online loan. In another, the protagonist receives a call from his landlord while on a delivery, harassing him about unpaid rent and threatening to evict his family. The scene is set against the backdrop of huge multi-storey apartments, highlighting the stark contrast between the wealth generated by residential real estate development in Indian cities and the ongoing struggles of the poor to keep a roof over their heads.
Thus, Baakki Vannavar addresses a range of crucial themes, urging the audience to reflect on them. The film does not simply reduce the life of a young platform-based delivery worker to his everyday mundanity, but rather places him within the broader consequences of new forms of economic marginalisation in urban landscapes, which were once seen as a glimmer of hope away from declining agricultural jobs in rural areas. Lastly, the film serves as a timely reminder for us to consider the emergence and growing prominence of platform-based gig work within the country’s political economy, rather than in isolation. In this spirit, instead of simply promising social security—which treats the symptom rather than the underlying problem—the government should reassess its economic policy on generating decent employment.
Muhammed Thwoyyib KP and Areesha Khan are researchers and students of political economy.
