India’s labor ministry is pushing the country’s booming quick-commerce sector to prioritize the wellness and safety of its gig workers.
The country’s minister of labor and employment, Mansukh Mandaviya, met with executives from Zomato’s Blinkit, Swiggy’s Instamart, and Zepto to ask them to drop their marketing language, which promises deliveries within 10 minutes, and discuss ways to improve safety and working conditions for delivery personnel, Bloomberg reported, citing anonymous sources.
While the instant delivery model has faltered elsewhere, it’s taken off in India at an unprecedented rate in the past few years as consumers in urban cities have come to expect having everything from PlayStation 5s to groceries delivered within 10 to 15 minutes.
Companies like Zepto, Blinkit, and Instamart have raised and poured hundreds of millions of dollars into setting up “dark stores” — discrete warehouses located strategically around neighborhoods that serve as hubs. These companies have also hired armies of delivery personnel as competition heats up in the country’s booming e-commerce space.
The pressure on workers has intensified as the sector has grown. On New Year’s Eve, more than 200,000 gig workers staged protests across major Indian cities during the peak delivery period, according to the South China Morning Post, citing the Indian Federation of App Based Transport Workers. The workers demanded legislative protection, social security benefits, better wages, and changes to automated penalty systems that reduce their ratings for late deliveries. Safety concerns have emerged around workers rushing through traffic to meet delivery deadlines. “Ultra-fast delivery models of 10-15 minutes materially change the risk and stress profile of gig work,” Prabir Jha, founder and CEO of the HR consultancy Prabir Jha People Advisory, told the outlet.
Amid the worker protests and pressure from the labor ministry, Blinkit has removed messaging that promised deliveries within 10 minutes, and its rivals are also expected to follow suit, Bloomberg said.
The news comes little more than a month after India granted legal status to millions of gig and platform workers under new labor laws that define gig and platform workers in statute, and require aggregators, such as food-delivery and ride-hailing platforms, to contribute 1% to 2% of their annual revenue (capped at 5% of payments made to such workers) to a government-managed social security fund.
India’s gig economy employed about 7.7 million workers in 2020-21 and is projected to reach 23.5 million by 2029-30, according to government think tank NITI Aayog.
Swiggy, Blinkit, and Zepto did not immediately return requests for comment.
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