Delivery agents criss-crossing the streets of major towns and cities do not even merit a second look in the country today. Over the past years, the service providers have morphed into a one-stop solution for virtually everything from the dining table to the kitchen shelves apart from expanding into delivery of various other sundry stuff at a reasonable cost, relatively. Despite various recorded fables of exploitation at the company level and terrible treatment meted out to them by class-conscious customers time and again, these gig workers have had their existence put into peril by various other reasons too. Reducing commissions, longer working hours have added to their miseries, despite protests from time and again to alleviate these problems. The recent incidents in two major cities – Noida and Mumbai (where women have been ‘living’ safer in comparison) have brought these service providers into focus once again, a rather uncomfortable one at that.

In August last, for a brief while the city papers of the national capital reported about how a customer found a plastic glove in a food item he ordered, and which was delivered by a Zomato executive. However, disgusting as it was, given the poor standards of hygiene and care which is usually seen for even critical issues like food delivery, it evoked a set of harsh comments all over and that was it.

What made people more concerned is that in a city, which is known for never going to sleep, ensuring a hectic pace of life 24x7, a Blinkit executive touched a customer inappropriately while delivering a consignment of hers. The insult to injury as the aggrieved lady wrote was that the company was found slow in

responding and did so only after submitting video evidence. While questionable standards of quality have often plagued the entire chain of people involved as elucidated earlier – from the hotels to the delivery agents – getting to violate the customer’s privacy and committing criminal acts calls for a coordinated action from all concerned. Merely seeing it as a law-and-order issue may not suffice as the composition of such field-level executives has been from the relatively underdeveloped regions of India, which have

had a steady exodus of labour into all the major cities and metros of India. Quite often, such incidents of crime have been explosive with a mix of political posturing and inter-regional tension accompanying any corrective action which has followed. All the same, service providers also need to be more mindful of the fact that however lackadaisical the Indian customer may be with regard to his rights, there is an increasing echo chamber in social media which can hurt their reputation and image if they do not calibrate their responses.

There are enough examples of how an initial wave of protest at a local level has ballooned to a national-level

agitation against brands and service providers. Maybe, this is the only safeguard left for the harried customer, as the support systems he/she banks upon have often let them down, especially when they need it badly.