Online food order delivery startup Swiggy has said that the company plans to bring on board an additional 300,000 delivery executives within the next year and a half. That will take the total head count to 500,000.
This information was shared by Swiggy’s CEO, Sriharsha Majety at the company’s tech conference. He reportedly said it wouldn’t be long before Swiggy becomes the third largest employer in the country behind the Indian Army and the Indian Railways. For the record, there are 12.5 lakh persons in the Indian Army and around 12 lakh work for the Indian Railways.
The CEO believes that Swiggy could turn into the largest private sector employer in the country. It will then beat the present leader TCS, the software giant that has 4.5 lakh employees as its strength. However, the difference between these and Swiggy is that the status of the employees in the delivery executive category is different.
Delivery executives are not directly employees on Swiggy’s rolls. They are all hired on a contractual basis and are not entitled to any other benefits like PF etc. that the regular employees in a company get.
Swiigy claims it has at present 2.1 lakh monthly active delivery staff. To be qualified as active, the delivery executive should have logged in active at least once a month.
Swiggy’s competitor in the business, Zomato has around 2,30,000 delivery executives. The other large employers of delivery executives include Flipkart and Amazon.
Swiggy has some very ambitious plans up its sleeve if you went by what the CEO Majety has to say; the startup claims to be delivering 500 million orders a year across 500 cities in India. The company wants to have 100 million customers transacting with it at least 15 times a month. That situation may reach over the next decade and a half.
One of the proposals the company has, is to create a cluster of ‘online delivery only’ restaurants/kitchens with no dine-in facility and this kind a pod of a kind that can ensure food being delivered to their customers within a matter of 10 minutes.