A few days ago, my wife and I were driving back home after dropping guests at the airport on a typical Bengaluru evening — chilly weather, heavy rains, waterlogged roads, and crazy traffic. We somehow managed to crawl up to the Hebbal flyover, after which the traffic completely stopped. The rain was now coming down hard and visibility was poor; my wife urged me to pull over to the roadside but I preferred to keep moving. In Bengaluru, the only thing worse than driving in heavy rains is driving after the rains stop; hordes of two-wheelers, sheltering from the downpour, join back into the traffic stream, including many gig workers riding recklessly to reach their delivery destinations.
I kept inching ahead on the flyover, in the middle of hundreds of other crawling cars, when we noticed a young man wearing the T-shirt of a popular food delivery app pausing next to our car. He was totally drenched, he had no shelter against the heavy rains, and yet he waited calmly for a traffic break to get ahead. Someone’s masala dose was getting delayed.
Over the past two decades, several startups have changed the concept of labour. Millions of gig workers — including delivery agents for merchandise, groceries, medicines, and food; quick commerce rushers; app-based drivers; and home repair and service teams — work across India in conditions that are modest at best. Mostly they tend to weave in and out of traffic on two-wheelers, inconveniencing other vehicles and posing a risk to their own safety and that of others on the road.
But seeing them braving rough weather conditions to meet customer commitments makes me sad. Maybe we can help by not placing urgent orders in such conditions.
A recent report comparing how various apps and sites treat gig workers is quite illuminating. Most of the sites have been rated average at best. Uber in the US started this model of treating drivers as self-employed and not its employees, but this hands-off approach may not work well in India.
The Karnataka government recently made an opportunistic proposal of levying on customers a 1-2 per cent transaction fee on every online transaction to create a welfare fund for gig workers. This sounded more like a new revenue model than any genuine concern.
Plus, there’s the big question: why should taxpayers create a fund for folks hired by private companies? Most of these companies are well funded and it’s their responsibility to care for their delivery agents. One way out is for them to start making profits and use a small portion of this to set up the fund. And therein lies another tale.
(The writer is a serial entrepreneur and best-selling author of the book ‘Failing to Succeed’; posts on X @vaitheek)