What's Your Gig?

Datamatics is trying to make the most of the booming gig economy through Wakency, its on-demand job platform for flexible work

- Rajiv Singh

It was December 2004. Carly Fiorina, former chief executive officer of Hewlett-Packard, in one of her speeches at San Francisco, spoke about the real essence of ‘numbers’. One must, she asserted, transform data from passive to active, and from static to dynamic. “The goal is to transform data into insight,” she said.

Back in Mumbai, Anju Kanodia, 40, seems to have taken a leaf out of Fiorina’s data speak. A KPMG report in 2017, she points out, pegged the temporary staffing sector in India to grow by 74 percent in four years to reach $5.3 billion. An overwhelming percentage of this industry—nearly 80 percent—is unorganised. Anju Kanodia is daughter-in-law of Lalit Kanodia, founder of Mumbai-headquartered IT software firm Datamatics, and part of the initial team which set up Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) in 1967. She dishes out more data: Gig economy—characterised by temporary, flexible and contractual jobs as opposed to permanent ones—in India has the potential to grow up to $20-30 billion by 2025.

According to a survey by Flexing It, an online marketplace that concentrates on hiring for skill based freelancers, over a third of the 500-plus organisations in India expect to rely on flexible talent up to 50 percent in the next five years.

Kanodia, for her part, is trying to turn this data into insight by rolling out the first consumer-facing business of Datamatics. Billed as India’s first on-demand flexible work community, for part-time, freelance and short-term jobs and gigs, Wakency—launched last August—lets users get their preferred job at their own time and place.