In the midst of India’s sprawling urban labyrinth, where millions navigate an uneven and chronically underfunded healthcare system, BlinkIt’s so-called ‘10-minute ambulance service’ emerges as a dazzling technocratic fix—a spectacle that promises to deliver life-saving care at the speed of a delivery app. Following in the footsteps of Uber’s expansion into public transport with shuttle services in Delhi, BlinkIt’s initiative reflects the deepening logic of platform capitalism, where even life-and-death urgency is subsumed under the imperatives of profit and logistical efficiency. To take this spectacle at face value would be a mistake, for beneath the surface allure of speed and innovation lies an ideological sleight of hand—one that obscures the structural causes of healthcare inequality while repackaging systemic failure as an opportunity for market intervention. What presents itself as a solution to healthcare inefficiency is, in fact, the commodification of the crisis: a reconfiguration of social vulnerability into an extractive site for capitalist accumulation.

The very concept of a ‘’10-minute ambulance’ fetishizes speed and efficiency, elevating them to an unattainable ideal that mirrors the illusory perfection of capitalist markets. The real question, however, is not whether ambulances can be faster, but why the infrastructure of care remains so inadequate that to save lives urgency itself must first be commodified. This points to a deeper contradiction at the heart of capitalist healthcare: the promise of salvation through technology, framed by the logic of privatization, which serves only to mystify and reproduce the material conditions of inequality that generate the need for such services in the first place. The fetishization of speed conceals this fundamental antagonism, presenting logistical efficiency as a substitute for structural reform. The ambulance, once an emblem of collective care and public responsibility, is stripped of its social purpose and reduced to an alienated product, available on demand for those who can afford it.

The ambulance, once an emblem of collective care and public responsibility, is stripped of its social purpose and reduced to an alienated product, available on demand for those who can afford it.

BlinkIt’s initiative—despite its veneer of humanitarian intent—functions as a mechanism of displacement, shifting the focus from the state’s abdication of responsibility to the seductive promise of market-driven efficiency. It masks the broader structural neglect of India’s healthcare system, where underfunding, unequal access, and precarious care networks are treated, not as political problems requiring collective solutions, but as market opportunities to be exploited. This reflects the ideological operation at work: the transformation of structural suffering into a solvable problem of logistics and speed. BlinkIt’s 10-minute ambulance, powered by algorithms and logistical frameworks, offers the illusion of control—a privatized simulation of care that operates much like the commodity form itself. By converting life-saving care into a product to be delivered, the service reinforces capitalist abstraction, where human need is transformed into an exchangeable unit of value.

This logic reveals the broader shift under platform capitalism, where the infrastructure of care becomes a site of value extraction. BlinkIt’s ambulance service does not resolve the crisis of healthcare; it capitalizes on it. The algorithmic mediation of urgency commodifies not only the ambulance but also the temporality of life and death itself. The speed of care becomes a value proposition, reinforcing the structural inequalities that produce the demand for emergency services in the first place. In this context, the ambulance ceases to function as a symbol of collective care and becomes an alienated commodity, severed from its social origins and reconstituted within the circuits of capital. The ideological operation is thus complete: the serviceability of care is no longer measured by its capacity to meet human need but by its ability to circulate as a profitable commodity in the expanding marketplace of “on-demand” services.

BlinkIt’s 10-minute ambulance service reflects platform capitalism’s deeper logic: the integration of care and social reproduction into circuits of value extraction.

BlinkIt’s 10-minute ambulance service reflects platform capitalism’s deeper logic: the integration of care and social reproduction into circuits of value extraction. The “10-minute ambulance” commodifies not only the service but also the temporality of care, transforming life-saving intervention into a logistical operation driven by market rhythms. Like quick commerce platforms that rely on a reserve army of gig workers for rapid delivery, BlinkIt’s ambulance service depends on the constant circulation and availability of precarious labor. This structural reliance on flexible, algorithmically managed workers ensures that the infrastructure remains responsive to market demands. In this context, speed and efficiency are not signs of social progress but symptoms of the commodification of life itself, where care is no longer a collective right but a product for sale. The ambulance, already privatized, does not represent a shift from public good to commodity but rather the deepening of its commodification within the logic of platform capitalism. What was once a symbol of life-saving intervention is now fully integrated into circuits of capital, where access to care is conditioned by one’s capacity to pay. This reflects not a retreat of the state but its active restructuring of healthcare through market mechanisms—outsourcing care to the private sector while maintaining the ideological fiction that technological efficiency can resolve structural inequality. The ambulance becomes a logistical node in the broader infrastructure of capital circulation, where life itself is abstracted and priced as a commodity.

The Fetish of Immediacy and Its Unequal Realities

By venturing into healthcare, quick commerce platforms like BlinkIt disrupt traditional industries in ethically and operationally troubling ways. The logistics-driven model fragments patient care, treating ambulances as mere vehicles for optimization. The deeper implication of this shift lies in its reflection of platform capitalism’s pervasive influence. By framing public goods like healthcare as markets ripe for disruption, platforms reinforce neoliberal logics that prioritize efficiency and profit over equity and collective welfare. These changes demand rigorous scrutiny. The encroachment of platform capitalism into essential services like healthcare highlights the urgent need to reclaim public goods from commodification. In contrast, BlinkIt’s approach fragments this process, reducing ambulances to logistical nodes optimized for speed and profit rather than patient welfare. This pivot reframes healthcare as a series of transactional exchanges, dismantling its ethos of holistic, patient-centered care.

The logic of immediacy reshapes the ambulance—once a symbol of emergency response—into a speculative asset for market diversification within the platform capitalism framework of data abstraction. Here, the fetishization of speed produces a perverse hierarchy: affluent neighborhoods with higher profitability indexes receive prioritized service, while rural and low-income areas face systemic neglect. This disparity is not an unintended consequence but an intrinsic feature of platform economics, where service provision is optimized to maximize revenue. The precariousness of platform-based services is underscored by their structural reliance on speculative investments and shareholder confidence. Platforms like Uber, Urban Company, and Swiggy are not sustained by the profitability of their direct service models alone but by the speculative logic of venture capital and financial markets.

Their operational model hinges on securing and maintaining investor confidence, which imposes a regime of profit-driven accountability that directly shapes the labor conditions and service structures within these platforms. Initial expansion and scaling strategies are often subsidized by investor capital rather than operational profitability.

Their operational model hinges on securing and maintaining investor confidence, which imposes a regime of profit-driven accountability that directly shapes the labor conditions and service structures within these platforms. Initial expansion and scaling strategies are often subsidized by investor capital rather than operational profitability. For instance, Uber operated at a loss for years, sustaining itself through rounds of venture capital funding and public market speculation. This speculative foundation creates a model where platforms must prioritize metrics that signal growth and market dominance — user engagement, market penetration, and data acquisition — over immediate profitability. Workers, in turn, become tethered to the platform’s speculative financial model.

The platform’s need to meet investor expectations translates into cost-cutting measures, increased commission rates, algorithmic tightening of performance metrics, and shifts toward subscription-based access to work. Platforms are compelled to extract more value from workers not necessarily to increase operational efficiency, but to maintain the appearance of profitability and growth for investors. This creates a double-bind for workers: they are not only subject to algorithmic and market-driven precarities but also to the speculative volatility of financial markets, where access to labor opportunities and service infrastructure is vulnerable to shifts in shareholder confidence. The platform’s continued operation — even for services positioned as public goods — is predicated not on public need or social utility but on the capacity to generate future returns for investors.

By embedding care within metrics of profitability, platform capitalism reveals its fundamental contradiction: the promise of efficiency comes at the expense of systemic exclusion. Rather than bridging gaps in healthcare, these models entrench existing inequities, transforming ambulances from instruments of universal access into tools of exclusion. This reconfiguration highlights the structural limitations of neoliberal service paradigms, which prioritize profit over equitable, consistent care. India’s healthcare system, riddled with inequities, provides fertile ground for such interventions. While over 70% of India’s population resides in rural areas, only a third of the nation’s physicians serve these regions. This disproportionate distribution underscores systemic neglect, exacerbating the healthcare accessibility crisis.

Recent policy efforts like the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) and Universal Health Coverage (UHC) aim to bridge these gaps by integrating digital infrastructures. However, these initiatives, rooted in the “Digital India” framework, often equate technological proliferation with genuine progress, sidestepping deeper issues of inequality and exclusion. BlinkIt’s rapid logistics model, celebrated as efficient, aligns with the digital frameworks underlying ABDM, where interoperability and digital health IDs are presented as tools of democratization. However, the parallels between BlinkIt’s urban logistics and ABDM’s health ecosystem expose troubling contradictions. Both embody a neoliberal obsession with scalability and optimization while embedding healthcare within a profit-driven architecture. The interoperability envisioned by ABDM mirrors BlinkIt’s data-driven systems—not as tools for equitable access, but as mechanisms for surveillance, commodification, and speculative value generation.

The state’s involvement in public-private partnerships (PPPs) in healthcare is not the reform it is often presented as; rather, it is the co-optation of public resources into private hands, under the guise of efficiency, with the consequence of widening the gap between those who can afford healthcare and those who cannot.

The state’s involvement in public-private partnerships (PPPs) in healthcare is not the reform it is often presented as; rather, it is the co-optation of public resources into private hands, under the guise of efficiency, with the consequence of widening the gap between those who can afford healthcare and those who cannot. Thus, the contradiction deepens: the ambulance is marketed as a lifeline for all, yet it is accessible only to those who can afford it. The inefficiencies and inequalities of the healthcare system are rebranded as opportunities for entrepreneurial intervention, commodifying not only the need for care but the very urgency of emergency situations. This is not simply an economic arrangement but a subtle ideological operation, reframing healthcare demands as questions of individual choice rather than collective responsibility. The system itself—the institutional structures that perpetuate vast healthcare inequalities—becomes rendered invisible, while the individual consumer is invited to navigate these inequities, not as a political subject, but as a passive, market-driven agent.

The ideological reconfiguration is complete: care, once a universal right, is transformed into a product, allocated according to the logic of capital. But let us delve deeper still, for there is something more sinister at play beneath the surface of this commodified intervention. Platform capitalism thrives on the commodification of absence. BlinkIt’s expansion into healthcare reflects this logic: systemic gaps in public infrastructure are transformed into profit-making opportunities. The fetishistic disavowal of neoliberalism is laid bare—we recognize that platforms profit from systemic absence, yet we accept their encroachment as inevitable. The logic extends beyond healthcare. BlinkIt’s diversification into beauty products, electronics, and toys illustrates how platforms monopolize immediacy, habituating consumers to an ever-expanding range of on-demand goods.

This transformation of time into a commodity redefines the rhythms of everyday life, subordinating even survival to the imperatives of speed and profit. When applied to critical infrastructures like ambulances, this commodification turns care and survival into privileges dictated by market forces, eroding the collective ethos of universal access. In this context, the notion of emergency care becomes distorted: instead of an unambiguous right grounded in the inherent value of human life, it becomes a transactional commodity, accessible only to those who can afford its price. This is not simply a shift in how services are delivered but a deeper ideological reconfiguration where the fundamental human need for care is subject to the whims of the market. The growing entanglement of essential services with market logic is further highlighted by the call from India’s largest group of retail distributors for the antitrust authority to investigate quick commerce giants—BlinkIt, Swiggy, and Zepto—for alleged predatory pricing. This demand reflects a broader unease about how these companies, operating at the intersection of technology and logistics, are reshaping not only consumer behavior but also the very frameworks of essential service provision.

This is not simply a shift in how services are delivered but a deeper ideological reconfiguration where the fundamental human need for care is subject to the whims of the market.

In pursuing growth through aggressive pricing models and rapid expansion, these platforms destabilize the social contract by introducing predatory tactics that undermine small businesses and exploit labor in a race to dominate the market. What emerges is a paradoxical scenario: platforms that promise efficiency and convenience simultaneously exacerbate inequality by reducing essential services to competitive arenas governed by market forces, all while pushing the boundaries of monopolistic control. These developments underscore a critical point: when public services are subsumed under the logic of rapid, on-demand delivery, the erosion of collective responsibility becomes inevitable. In the case of healthcare and essential services, where survival itself is at stake, this shift risks deepening social divisions by privileging those who can afford to access care at the speed of the market, while leaving the most vulnerable to suffer from an infrastructural collapse that no market-based solution can truly fix.

The State’s Role in Ideological Disavowal and Normalization of the Absence of Care

Moreover, the structure of BlinkIt’s ambulance service, segmented into categories like Basic Life Support (BLS), Advanced Life Support (ALS), and air ambulances, reveals the fractured nature of contemporary healthcare itself. The myth of universal care is shattered when these services become marketized, stratified according to one’s ability to pay. These distinctions do not merely reflect varying levels of sophistication in care; they expose the widening gulf between social classes: those who can afford advanced services and those who must settle for the basics. In this way, the very concept of care is subverted into a differential mechanism of access—a cruel mimicry of universalism. Late capitalist healthcare is thus a system of exclusions masquerading as inclusivity, where access to care depends not on the inherent dignity of life, but on one’s disposable income. The ambulance, once a symbol of care, is now the engine of this exclusion, its life-saving potential contingent upon the market’s rules of exchange, rather than a universal commitment to welfare.

The platformization of governance, particularly through infrastructures like Aadhaar, reconfigures state-citizen relations under market logic. Aadhaar authentication functions as a gatekeeping mechanism that transforms access to public services—including healthcare and welfare—into a transactional exchange mediated by data systems. Under this model, access to essential services is no longer a right but a conditional service contingent on successful authentication and market-driven incentives. This reflects a deeper shift where governance itself becomes a site of value extraction: the state functions not as a sovereign authority but as an infrastructural intermediary facilitating exchanges between citizens, corporate actors, and data systems. Through Aadhaar, the state enables the commodification of welfare, embedding access to public goods within market circuits of data extraction and algorithmic optimization. Citizens are no longer subjects of governance but users of a service whose interactions—whether seeking healthcare, receiving subsidies, or accessing financial services—are quantified, monitored, and exploited as data assets. The reduction of governance to a market operation reflects the logic of platform capitalism, where even the delivery of care, education, and welfare is subject to competition and profit extraction.

The state, in its continued role as a facilitator of this privatized landscape, acts not as an arbitrator of equity, but as an active participant in the alienation of healthcare from the public sphere. It becomes the ‘sublime object of ideology,’ framing the entire field of health in market terms. This is the paradox of neoliberalism: the state recedes in form, but its ideological function remains inscribed in every marketized process. It becomes the architect of inequality, providing the backdrop against which ‘efficient’ healthcare delivery is made possible only through private enterprise. Thus, the ambulance service is not merely a failure of healthcare; it is an ideological intervention in our very understanding of care. It operates as a simulacrum—a commodity masquerading as a necessity, transforming the universal right to care into a consumable product for the privileged.

The critical task, then, is not to simply tinker with BlinkIt’s logistical efficiency to aid it in maintaining an appearance of inclusivity but to question the very conditions that render such services necessary. The real question is not how to make the ambulance faster, but how to conceive of a healthcare system that transcends market logic—a system that prioritizes the right to care, not as a commodity, but as a collective good, unmediated by profit. This critique of BlinkIt’s ambulance service, then, is not just a critique of technology or logistics, but a critique of the political economy that produces these forms of care. Only by confronting the contradictions within healthcare and pushing for a fundamental restructuring of the relationship between the state, the market, and care can we begin to address the underlying inequalities that plague India’s health system.

In this light, the critique of BlinkIt’s ambulance service transcends a mere examination of a potential market failure or the regulatory shortcomings that accompany it.

In this light, the critique of BlinkIt’s ambulance service transcends a mere examination of a potential market failure or the regulatory shortcomings that accompany it. It is, rather, a profound critique of the very capitalist logic that not only generates such failures but also sustains them as a permanent feature of the healthcare system. The logic of efficiency and speed, epitomized in this ambulance service, is but a symptom of a deeper ideological condition: the transformation of human need into a transaction, of suffering into a market opportunity. This commodification of care reduces what should be a fundamental human right to a privilege contingent upon one’s economic position. BlinkIt’s ambulance services thus serve as a microcosm of a broader ideological struggle, one that necessitates rethinking public goods as spaces of resistance to commodification and capital’s relentless abstraction. The stakes are clear: the commodification of care, survival, and time must be contested.