Coronavirus: How Swiggy is ensuring citizens stay indoors during the lockdown

Years from now, the world will still talk about 2020 as the year a global pandemic forced people to confine themselves to their homes, and life as we knew it, and the conveniences we took for granted, changed forever.

Amidst the COVID-19 chaos, various service providers delivering essentials like groceries, medication, and food have become the fuel that keeps our daily lives running. At the forefront is India’s largest food ordering and delivery service Swiggy, which also started the delivery of essentials and groceries last year. As of March 2019, the Bengaluru-headquartered platform is operating across 100 Indian cities.

“We have proven to be a bit of a lifeline to a lot of people. I'm happy the government included what we do as an essential service. During this lockdown, several families with working couples, or young single people who have not been able to go home, or don’t know how to cook, have been heavily reliant on us. Your cook is not going to come and you can't go out to eat. We have kept a minority of our fleet active in doing the work that we do so that no one is inconvenienced,” says Vivek Sunder, COO, Swiggy.

Speaking about the ways they have adapted to the stringent social distancing regulations imposed by the government, Vivek says customers would have noticed a  visible difference in how Swiggy delivery personnel operate.

“The executive would have been wearing a mask and gloves. If you had opted for ‘contactless delivery', he would have notified you to pick up the delivery from a clean place outside the house that is mutually agreed upon.”

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Connecting to kiranas and supermarkets

Swiggy, which launched its grocery pilot before the outbreak, has also been successfully fulfilling orders from local kirana stores and select mid-range stores.

“With this lockdown, a  host of people who are tied to their homes are asking us to connect our fleet to the kirana store or the local supermarket. We have also had requests from the government, and are currently operating in about 10 cities and rapidly expanding,” Vivek says.

Vivek says Swiggy is doing its part to ensure that people stay safe during the lockdown. 

“There's so much inbound demand. If you take some of the cities like Lucknow or Jalandhar, we are making sure people follow the lockdown by sitting at home. They can just go to the Swiggy app and order from the neighbourhood kirana store. We are not looking at it in economic terms but in terms of how many customer problems we’re solving. So, even if it's just 3,000 people who ordered, that’s 3,000 people who didn't stir out and it's a good thing for the country,” Vivek says.