Some weeks ago, the sneaky little so-and-so’s at Uber sent me a message that went something like this: Congratulations, you gullible little nitwit! You’ve been selected for our latest social experiment: Uber Pass! Pay really low fares to travel around Pune. Take ten rides in ten days or so, and we’ll let you play this game for the next ten days. Start playing, sucker!
Or that was the gist of it, at any rate. To be fair to Uber, the rates really are attractive. The deal simply is too good to pass up (if you will excuse and appreciate the pun). But the evil genius bit lies in the gamification. We humans, it turns out, love a contest. If Uber had told us that the rates are whatever they are, and said “Go ride”, I doubt much would have changed.
But put a bit of cheese at the end of the maze, and ask us to run along it, and we’ll scamper up down the alleys all day long. When you give me a deadline and a number of rides to finish, I’m playing a game – and I’ll do what it takes to win, by god. I find myself taking rides to places I could just as easily have walked to, simply to finish my assigned quota. Genius. Evil, but I’ll hand it to them: genius nonetheless.
Now, having spent most of the last four weeks gallivanting about town in Uber cars, I’ve had many conversations with the drivers of those cars. And while this wasn’t a scientific survey, the numbers are startling. Almost all of them, it turns out, have migrated to Pune in the last couple of years. There either isn’t enough land to till, or there aren’t enough jobs on offer back in their villages, and therefore they move to Pune, in search of gainful employment.And we’re talking hundreds of thousands of people (not all of them are Uber drivers, of course).
There’s a story to be told about how they’ve ended up working for far many more hours than they’ve budgeted for, and how Uber has effectively created a market out of next to nothing in the last three years – but we’ll leave that be for another day.
One advantage, if one can call it that, of sitting in the back of the car rather than having to drive it, is that one gets a lot of time to think. And one such extended rumination led to a rather scary thought, which I shall now cheerfully proceed to share with you: India’s urbanization rate today is roughly 35%. That is to say, only one out of three Indians stay in urban agglomerations – the rest are in India’s villages. Among the largest economies in the world, we have, by far and away, the lowest urbanization rate. The next country on that list is China, and she is at 60%, roughly twice as much as us.
The evidence is inescapable: no country has managed to develop without urbanization, and if we by 2050 aim to be a developed nation, we’re looking at urbanization rates of at least 60%. There’s going to be 1.5 billion of us by 2050 – and 60% of that is 900 million people. As opposed to 35% of 1.3 billion today, which is about 450 million.
Put another way, India’s cities are likely to be twice as crowded thirty years from now as they are today. Pune might well have, you understand, twice as many people then as it does now. And at least twice as many, it stands to reason, cars, buses, motorbikes and bicycles.
Uber Pass, I think it is safe to say, is here to stay.
#All views expressed in this column are the authors.
He doesn't expect the paradox to be resolved in his lifetime
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