Just a few years ago, there was almost no online food delivery in India. But today Zomato has 200,000 people bringing food to middle class consumers in 500 cities across the country. In 18 months, it hopes to double that number, its co-founder Gaurav Gupta says. Its average delivery person receives Rs22,000 ($306) a month gross or between Rs15,000 to Rs18,000 in take-home pay, depending on whether they travel by push bike or motor bike.
If you add up the numbers of people working for Zomato’s great rival Swiggy, for ride-hailing services including Ola and Uber, and the army of those delivering parcels ordered from Amazon and Flipkart, the grand total might add up to 1.5m, according to estimates from McKinsey’s Mumbai office. Include the multiplier effect of that army serving the new economy and an optimist might come up with 5m jobs created by consumer-facing tech companies and cite it as one of the few hopeful signs in an economy that appears to be struggling.
With gross domestic product growth hovering at no more than 5 per cent a year — far less than the level required to absorb the up-to-1m people cited as joining the workforce every month — sentiment is dismal, as dark as the clouds of pollution hovering over Delhi.