Singed by fuel costs, falling pay, delivery workers opt out

In the beginning, when he started working for Zomato in Hyderabad in 2020, the pay was attractive. Annu did around 120-130 orders a week and made about ₹10,000. Like most delivery workers then, he was paid on a weekly basis. “There was a minimum guarantee payment, a day off every week, and I would deliver within a 5-6km area. But that has changed. I had to do around 30 orders a day. I made around ₹1,500 daily, but I was paying ₹300-400 for fuel," he said. Sometimes, he would have to travel 15-20km to deliver an order. In the middle of a particularly hot day last year, he landed up at a hospital, dehydrated and drained. But he had to be out for delivery the next day.

As fuel costs soar and the heat becomes more oppressive, it is only getting tougher for the thousands of workers who bring food to our homes. Like Annu, many of them are choosing to opt out of work that entails gruelling hours and dwindling earnings.

Last month, for example, 34-year-old Jagdish Kumar Sharma in Delhi quit his job as a delivery executive with Zomato. He had lasted only a month, though he had joined after having worked with Swiggy for five years. Sharma said he enjoyed his work—he knew the areas well and made enough money to sustain a family of four in Delhi’s Sarai Kale Khan area — till he started getting orders from far-flung locations. Deliveries took longer, and his six-year-old bike was guzzling expensive fuel. The incentives linked to fuel costs were not enough, he said. By 2021, Sharma said his monthly income, once he had paid for fuel, had reduced to ₹15,000-18,000, about ₹5,000 less than what he was earning in 2017. At Reliance JioMart, where he is working as a delivery executive, he hopes for a more stable pay and predictability in orders.

This is just the kind of move that Ahmed Shaikh, a 32-year-old delivery executive in Mumbai, is hoping to make. After 20-30 deliveries a day, Shaikh earns ₹1,000, much like what he would earn two years ago. The difference? Now he is paying nearly triple the amount on fuel. “Every day, we look for new jobs," says the Swiggy delivery executive, who typically reaches home around 12.30 am after a long day.

As weary delivery workers drop off the grid, food delivery aggregators are struggling with rider shortages. “For the past eight weeks or so, deliveries are taking longer. There are fewer riders around, and they’re travelling long distances," said Naman Pugalia, founder of Peppo, an online delivery platform that lets restaurants sell across channels and connects them to logistics providers using a dashboard. Last week, Swiggy temporarily halted its Genie service in three cities because of a dearth of workers.

A spokesperson for Zomato said it is hiring more workers to meet a surge in demand. “The early onset of summers has also led to a reduction in delivery partners working during the afternoons. Keeping in mind the heatwave, we have set up refreshment centres in top cities in collaboration with our restaurant partners to keep our partners hydrated for the next 2-3 months," she said. A spokesperson for Swiggy declined to comment.

Ajoy Thomas, vice-president and business head (retail, e-commerce, logistics and transportation) of staffing firm TeamLease Services, believes shrinking pay-outs have taken the sheen off the delivery gig. “A year ago, the pay-out was as high as ₹35 per order. It is below ₹15 now. This is basically being done by the big players, as the delivery executive pay-out constitutes among the highest costs for a company," he said.

The Zomato spokesperson, however, said that on average, “delivery partner pay-outs per hour have increased by 14% in the past six months". A big chunk of the hike (60%), she said, was linked to the rise in fuel costs.

What might be allowing workers like Sharma and Annu to find an exit is a spurt in options.

In the aftermath of the pandemic, an estimated 2 to 3 lakh people moved to gig work as several sectors like tourism, hospitality and beauty services were paralysed by covid lockdowns. Now with the economy opening up and salaried jobs returning, workers are looking for other opportunities.

“More opportunities are opening up in travel and tourism, for example. This is one of the reasons people are moving out," Thomas said. Swiggy and Zomato are also facing the heat at the cost of new players entering the quick grocery space, he said.

Pugalia also said the emergence of quick grocery could be prompting riders to switch. “They’ll go where the incentives are," he said.

“Between food delivery and quick commerce—life in the latter is a little better. Everything is pre-defined, like from where you will pick up the order," Thomas said.

Mint had earlier reported that quick commerce firms are set to double gig worker hires. Research done by TeamLease Services Ltd said companies hired 70,000 to 80,000 gig workers in the last fiscal. This churn is prompting workers like Sharma to scout for better opportunities.

Sharma, who was born in Ayodhya and failed his Class X exams, said he knows his options are limited. But he is reluctant to return to his life before he became a delivery worker—Sharma was employed at a cottage-cheese factory in Old Delhi, earning ₹12,000 a month while sharing a room with seven other workers. And so, despite Delhi’s crippling heat and high fuel prices, he is out on his two-wheeler every day, hoping this new job will give him a fixed salary, if not more generous pay-outs—and a better deal.