Hyderabad: Swiggy executives go offline

Hyderabad: The Covid pandemic since March has had a crippling fallout on sectors across the country. As the lockdown norms were relaxed, online food delivery services like Swiggy, Zomato, etc, were upbeat hoping that there would be an increase in online delivery of food services. However, the pandemic cast a shadow on these services and they witnessed a huge fall in orders. Subsequently, the service providers restructured their payments in negative to the delivery executives.

As a result, considered as the backbone of Swiggy, the delivery executives resorted to staging protests against the new payment structure. They say their monthly payment has come down to the lowest that they are unable to even afford their daily fuel charges. Their every day earnings have fallen to around Rs 200 to Rs 300 after working for nine hours and travelling not less than 40 km.

Around 60 per cent of Swiggy delivery executives have been protesting for the last five days by going offline from the delivery application. "We are protesting against the new payment structure. Earlier, every order in 5 km range used to provide Rs 40 and now it has been reduced to Rs 25. If we hit a day's target of Rs 400 in 8 hours, we used to get Rs 175 incentive. But now the target has been increased to Rs 900 order in 12 hours for the same incentive paid earlier," said G Akhil, a Swiggy executive.

"We have no orders after lockdown, we used to get around 30 orders everyday and we were earning around Rs 1,200 per day. But now we hardly receive six to seven orders and it's difficult to make Rs 300 per day. Even after working for 16 to 17 hours in a day, we are unable to reach daily targets to get incentives," said N Kishore, another executive. "It's been three years I have been working with Swiggy as an executive, I get around Rs 25 per order, but newly joined executives make only Rs 15 per order which was Rs 35 before lockdown," he added.

They demand that everyday target amount be reduced from Rs 900 to Rs 500 considering the reducing number of orders. They want restructure of average payment per order back to Rs 35 from the current new payment of Rs 15. They also demand revocation of the cancelled first mile charges of Rs 6 per km as per distance.