Sramana MUKHERJEE, National Institute of Technology Rourkela, India
Dushyant NARANG, Magicpin, India
The current onslaught of the global Coronavirus pandemic that has marked its presence with the need for social distancing, self-isolations, quarantines, and administrative regulatory lockdowns, has in turn ushered in a major transition into an all-consuming digital realm, from the physical, material world. As a result, space – both physical and social – and the embedded mobilities, therein, is undergoing transformations in the way they are being perceived today. With increased virtual interactions, among a significant section of the population, emerging through tele-mediated interrelationships, over digital platforms, at work (with Remote Working), in education (with online schooling), in consumption patterns (online shopping and delivery of products) and political undertakings (such as mailed in polling), there arose a dearth of physical oscillations of people across the globe. With the emerging notion of home-offices skyrocketing under the influence of COVID-19, newer trends were set in motion, making it intriguing to understand how digital work patterns are (or not) restricting physical mobility. The present study, through its explorations of the idea of remote working in India, seeks to establish whether digital technology is taking over the notion of territorial space and therefore, nullifying the requirements of human mobility to physical office spaces. It adopts an online primary survey method among IT sector employees of India, followed by data pre-processing, correlations, visualization, and interpretation on Python programming language using libraries such as pandas, seaborn and scikit-learn. The study summarizes results across various socio-demographic categories to answer questions of efficiency and productivity, availability of infrastructure and work environment, major challenges and benefits encountered, and the desired continuity of remote working over physical mobility to offices.
Mots clés : Remote Working|Digital Geography|Mobility|Coronavirus|India
A104646SM