What Quick Commerce Has Done to the Indian City

In Indian cities, ten minutes is no longer just a measure of duration. It has become a promise, a dare, a brand identity. Tap the map and a scurrying dot assures you that groceries, biryani, or ice cream are already in motion, that the city has bent itself into an obedient system of dark stores, riders, algorithms, and impatience.

India’s 10-minute delivery model—pushed most aggressively by Zepto and Blinkit, and folded into the wider food-delivery ecosystem of Swiggy and Zomato—has grown into a market estimated at over $3.5 billion in annual gross merchandise value. Investors call it quick commerce. Consumers call it relief. Workers increasingly call it dangerous.

The strikes planned by delivery personnel around the year-end are a long accumulation of fatigue. December 31 is one of the busiest delivery nights of the year, a moment when the entire system reveals itself at full speed, exposing the strain beneath the promise. Unions have framed year-end peak demand as leverage, listing grievances around low and volatile pay, opaque incentive structures, arbitrary deactivations, safety risks, and an explicit demand to roll back the “10-minute delivery” model.  

India did not invent ultra-fast delivery. China experimented with it early, Europe flirted with it and the United States funded it extravagantly and then stepped back. What India did differently was normalise it. In dense cities, short travel distances, two-wheelers, and relatively inexpensive labour made it possible to promise what would be economically or legally implausible elsewhere. A ten-minute window could be carved out by stocking micro-warehouses every few kilometres and transferring risk onto riders classified as independent “partners”. The system works because the costs are distributed downward and rarely itemised upward.

Ten minutes does not simply compress distance; it compresses judgement. It turns traffic lights into suggestions and fatigue into something to be managed later. Delivery workers have long said that ultra-tight timelines increase accident risk and stress, even when platforms insist riders are not penalised for delays. The algorithm may not shout, but it nudges. What workers are protesting now is not only pay, which many say has declined even as fuel and maintenance costs rise, but the cumulative effect of a model that rewards constant motion without providing the stabilisers of formal employment.

Criticism of 10-minute delivery has sharpened globally. What began as scepticism about sustainability has hardened into concern about labour safety and urban ethics. The question is no longer whether groceries can arrive in ten minutes, but whether a city should be optimised for that outcome.

In China, platforms such as Meituan and Ele.me faced public outrage after a series of rider accidents. The response: platforms introduced limited “flex time” changes and regulators moved toward rules on algorithmic management and minimum protections, reframing speed as something to be governed rather than endlessly advertised. Europe’s 10–15-minute grocery boom rapidly consolidated under profitability pressure, with headline deals like Getir’s acquisition of Gorillas symbolising a sector pulling back from hypergrowth. In the United States, companies like Gopuff tested ultra-fast delivery but quietly widened time windows once the economics turned unforgiving. 

India stands apart not because it is uniquely reckless, but because it is uniquely permissive. Labour regulation in the gig economy remains light, enforcement uneven, and the legal status of algorithmic management largely untested. Speed survives here because nothing yet forces it to slow down.

India’s difference is structural. Scale provides dense demand without proportionate increases in wages. Informality allows a workforce accustomed to precarity to absorb risks that would provoke litigation elsewhere. Competition turns delivery time into a weapon rather than a service metric. Aspiration wraps it all in the rhetoric of progress: ten minutes as proof that the Indian city has arrived.

Yet the same conditions that made the model possible are now making it unstable. Delivery work is no longer a stopgap but a livelihood. Platforms are under pressure to chase profitability, tightening incentives and margins. Congestion is worsening, shrinking the buffer between promise and accident. Workers are organising not against technology or convenience, but against the fiction that speed is costless.