Delivery platform Swiggy plans to recruit 300,000 new drivers

Swiggy, popular food-delivery startup, might just be the next big thing in India for the blue collar private sector, as its growth and success is leading to a hiring boom of nearly 300,000 over the next year and a half.

“If some of our growth estimates continue, it will not be too many years before we can be the third-largest source of employment in the country, behind the Army and Indian Railways,” Co-founder and CEO Sriharsha Majety said at the company’s maiden annual tech conference called Gigabytes.

The Indian Army employs 12.5 lakh (hundred-thousand) and Indian Railways had over 12 lakh people at the end of March 2018. IT major TCS, which had 4.5 lakh staff as of September 2019, is the largest private-sector employer and mostly consists engineers. All three give employees benefits and full-time employment, as compared to blue-collar jobs that Swiggy offers to delivery personnel who are paid depending on the work done.

Swiggy currently has 2.1 lakh monthly active delivery staff and about 8,000 corporate employees on its payroll. While delivery personnel are not entitled to standard benefits like provident fund, etc, since they are not on Swiggy’s payroll, the expansion in its overall delivery fleet will make it one of the largest job-enablers underlining the importance of ‘gig-economy’ in India. Swiggy defines a delivery partner as active who at least logs in once a month.

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