A Yearning Against Efficiency

GIVEN INDIA’S LONG tryst against consumers, it is not much of a surprise that Zomato, the food delivery service, got backlash after they announced that they could now get orders into homes within 10 minutes. This would have been welcome in a society that values efficiency. Instead, there has been outrage in both social and traditional media on how this is a bad idea. They have two main arguments as follows: it poses a danger because deliverers would go at breakneck speeds to reach before deadline; and delivery people would be exploited because the number of deliveries would multiply. One article in Swarajya termed it an “incredible stupidity” asking whether “instant gratification” of consumers was a good thing. Karti Chidambaram, an MP, tweeted: ‘This is absurd! It’s going to put undue pressure on the delivery personnel, who are not employees & who have no benefits or security, who have no bargaining power with @zomato I have raised this in Parliament & have written to the Govt. Will pursue this further.’

All these are anticipated demons. They are the worst-case scenarios. Even if the company had not clarified that the delivery personnel would not know that they were making a 10-minute delivery, taking away their incentive to speed, none of these concerns are a given. What will happen is probably what happened in the past to such models cutting down delivery times. It works in the beginning in limited places but once they try to scale, it becomes unfeasible, ending up at the usual average of what roads in India allow. Numerous startups based on deliveries have tried and failed to do it in a universal manner. Or it ends up as a disappointing customer experience because the choice of goods on offer is so limited that there is no gratification, solving Swarajya’s quibble. The correlation is straight between shortness of the delivery time and funding that the startup is raising. As soon as the tap closes a little, these ambitions are the first to be discarded.

But it still makes it a worthwhile venture to attempt because this is how services become better in the marketplace. To ask for slower delivery is the peculiar idea of not wanting a system to get better—the logic of horses over cars, or going on strike against computerisation of banks. As for labour exploitation, there is no better check than competition. The accusation also glosses over the fact that in the gig economy, more deliveries means more money, not just for the business but also for the labour. When Chidambaram says it is going to put undue pressure on personnel, he is saying that personnel should not have agency to take on that pressure and improve their livelihood. Others must decide how hard they must work. At a not-too-distant future, technology like drones will simply make human deliveries obsolete but until then, at least let the deliverers make as much as they can.

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Madhavankutty Pillai

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