In 2024, if you're a software engineer working 70 hours a week, you will earn on an average Rs 20,000 a month. But if you're a food delivery partner, you will be making about Rs 30,000 a month. Enam, Rs 40,000.
Rs 40,000? Bhaiya! For thousands of years, our youth, predominantly from a certain region, had only one aspiration to go abroad to become a rider, provider for their families back home. Fast forward to today, the location and the extent of these aspirations have changed. Lakhs and lakhs of...
Indians are becoming food delivery riders. You'd be surprised with even the ones with college degrees and full-time jobs. It's now overtaking every other profession as the most lucrative, prestigious and rewarding career path out there.
even the previous leader, the IT fresher. If you think we're crazy, stick around till the end. So, how and when did this shift happen? The investigative team of Full Disclosure went out on the streets to reach the bottom of this rabbit hole.
We went around asking delivery riders information only they would know. Some cooperated and some didn't, until we found this guy. And that guy. What's your name? What's your name?
Shubha My name is Tayapa Since when have you been doing this? Since morning No, I mean since how long have you been working as a delivery rider? I have been working here for the past 3 years.
Great! And how much do you earn? I earn 40,000.
40-50 thousand. 50,000? Yes.
50,000? Yes. He fainted because he probably makes that in two months. Anyway, so how did these guys end up making more than Rs. 40,000 a month just by delivering food?
How much do you earn in a day, a week and a month? I earn Rs. 15,000-12,000 a day. I earn Rs. 10,000-12,000 a week. I earn Rs. 40,000-50,000 a month.
Wow! Are you lying? Can you show us? To understand the minimum, average and maximum a food delivery rider can make, let us first understand their payment structure.
You see, the bigger food delivery services in India like Swiggy and Zomato, they don't hire these delivery partners full time. They're never in contract with the companies and hence are not employees and therefore they're not liable to any fixed monthly salary. The delivery riders delivering food to your doorsteps, they work as freelancers with these companies.
So there are three types of work they can undertake. Either they do a full time shift where they log in and have to work minimum eight hours, a part time shift where they have to work minimum four hours or gigs where they can take up any two to three hour slot through the day. So when a delivery rider logs it for the day, they start getting orders that need to be delivered.
They don't get to choose which delivery they want to perform, instead they're assigned orders from the back end. All they can see is the distance and the estimated earnings when they complete that delivery. They can however accept or decline the delivery, but the catch is they can't decline too many deliveries or they get penalized for it. And the opposite is true as well.
The more deliveries that they complete, the closer they get to their incentives. And incentives, surgeries and night time deliveries are where the money is at. And do you earn from Swiggy deliveries or do you get tips and incentives as well?
You get tips as well. If you come in a rain shirt, you get a rain jacket. It's 10 bucks per kilometre. There are tips and incentives.
You get a minimum of 5000 extra for tips. So while they're only required to finish the 8-hour, 4-hour or 2-3 hour gig, Most push to 12-13 hours a day to meet their incentives. There is a base payout for every delivery regardless of the distance covered.
For Zomato, that number is Rs. 40 and for Swiggy, it is Rs. 20. This base payout happens for all orders under 5 km. So it doesn't matter if they're delivering the order just 500 meters away or 4.95 km away because this base payout remains the same and the delivery rider earns more or less around Rs. 10 for every single kilometer. Now suppose if the rider has to pick an order from Kormangala in Bangalore and drop it somewhere in Indranagar, he covers a distance of 3.5 km and he will get his base pay plus some tips that's if the customer is generous. But if they were to deliver an order from Indranagar to Hebbal which is a distance of 12 km, they would get their base pay of 40 plus 10 rupees for every extra kilometer that they travel.
10 rupees per kilometer. For Zomato, the delivery partners get paid incentives based on the number of orders delivered and for Swiggy, the delivery partners get paid incentives based on the amount they earn on a single day. So for reaching 1000 rupees in a day, they get 300 rupees as an incentive and the entire chart looks something like this.
For example, they get 1700 rupees for 29 deliveries and 2600 rupees for every 35 deliveries. So to get to these incentives, the riders start pushing towards 12 to 13 hours every day and they work close to and sometimes more than 70 hours a week. These riders are able to travel 8 to 12 kilometers every hour.
This can be over two or three short deliveries or one very long delivery and every hour they're able to make about 100 to 120 rupees. Given that they work about 70 hours a week, they can make about 7,000 to 8,400 rupees just from deliveries but with tips and incentives. this number can easily go over 10 to 11 thousand. That is more than 43 thousand rupees in one month. And in between the time we interviewed him and the video going live, Shiva was actually able to make not 43 thousand but 50. 50,000 rupees this month and even sent us a screenshot about it.
Sweet guy. But what does all of this mean for you? Surely, the delivery riders are earning a lot. Like a lot more than we expected them to earn. It may even seem counterintuitive to think that delivery riders are earning more than our engineers.
But that's the reality of the times we live in. Think about it for a second. Millions of young Indians migrate every year to these tier 1 cities to fulfill their parents' and they take up IT and software jobs. Jobs that actually have been paying more or less the same salary for the last 10 years even as inflation keeps rising and work hours get more taxing.
And then they find out that delivery riders have been making more money than them. Not just that they're earning more, they're even able to save more money. Yes madam, I'm saving.
You're saving? How much do you save? Yes madam, I save Rs. 30,000.
Every month? Yes madam. Every month 30,000? Yes, every month.
And it may also look like they're less stressed at work. But the takeaway is not for you to quit your jobs and start delivering food. Obviously. But what other choices do our freshers have? Even though these guys are making good money right now, even they realize that neither is this sustainable nor dependable in the long run.
Their earnings from Swiggy and Zomato are only a means to an end for their actual dreams. The two folks we interviewed today, they were less than 25 years of age. Shiva was 22 and Tayapa was 23. I know, I couldn't believe it myself. And in such a short time, they have been able to earn and save amounts that we definitely would not have expected out of blue-collared workforce. Forget blue-collared workforce actually, I also hadn't started actively saving when I was 22. So till now, how long have you been saving?
Already 2 lakhs, madam. It's been 6 months. 2 lakhs in 6 months? Yes, ma'am. Are you investing for something?
Yes, ma'am. I want to start a business in my village. I want to give a team art to the villagers.
These guys have big aspirations and big dreams. They come from small towns and they relocate to these bigger cities to fulfill dreams that are much larger than themselves. When I was interviewing Shiva, he told me how he invests the money he saves and how he's learnt all of this off YouTube. I mean, that's pretty crazy, right?
Do you invest? Yes ma'am. Do you know about investment? Yes ma'am.
I saw it on YouTube. And he's been saving all this money because he has a dream of starting a supermarket business like D-Mart for his village. He wants to employ more people and he was just so entrepreneurial in his thoughts. A D-Mart.
I want to give work to my village. So when... people with much lesser resources and access than the rest of us here are striving so hard to figure life out to make a name for themselves what is stopping the rest of us the rest of you the idea of this video is not to scare you it's to show you the reality of the world we live in and if there is one thing that i want you to take away from this video it's not that food delivery riders are making more than i.t freshers in the country today it's that just like them you can be doing a lot more with your prime life yours Tayapa and Shiva are two live examples of this in front of us.
They taught us that it's never enough to just do the bare minimum. Today you may be 20, 22, 23 years of age, but at the age of 30 or 40, we wouldn't want you to look back and regret all the risks you did not take. It doesn't matter what you choose to do in life, but it is important that you do your best in whatever you do. And you should try to become the top 1% in whichever field you are.
I'm sure Tayapa and Shiva are one of the top few people in their respective organizations who are doing so well and I'm dead sure that with their entrepreneurial mindset, they are going to grow up to be very successful, maybe more successful than their peers. And we hope they inspire you too to reflect on your life. Anyways, that was our full disclosure on trying to show you the reality of earnings of our food delivery partners. That's all for today.
Thank you for staying till the end of the video. We hope you take away something from this. We put in a lot of effort in this so if you resonated with it, please drop us a comment.
And please don't forget to hit that subscribe button. My name is Lavina Kamath. Thanks for watching. Bye!