Relief as home deliveries resume

Rules Eased Four Days Into Lockdown

Yogesh Kabirdoss & Aditi R TNN

Chennai:30.03.2020

It was a sigh of relief for many as food aggregators began accepting orders on Sunday after the state government allowed app-driven e-commerce firms to function.

Residents were able to get food, groceries and meat delivered at their doorsteps four days after the shutdown kicked in.

A couple of apps selling fresh meat and fish also opened up, but with limited number of people to deliver.

Shiva, a cashier of a leading chain of restaurants at Anna Nagar, said five orders were delivered for breakfast and lunch through apps on Sunday. “Though our restaurant is associated with two apps, delivery agents from one app arrived to collect orders,” he said.

Last week, the state government had suspended operations of app-based food delivery aggregators including Swiggy, Zomato and Uber as part of the lockdown to contain the spread of Coronavirus.

Saravanan, a food delivery agent, said police personnel were allowing his colleagues to deliver food but only during the fixed timings. “I may join duty from Monday. My friends on Sunday told me that police were questioning the agents if they were found on roads beyond the permitted time,” he said. Deliveries are available from 7am to 9.30am, noon to 2.30pm and 6pm to 9pm.

A few restaurants also used their existing staff to deliver food to people. “But that too was very few,” said Sandesh Reddy, chef, and restaurateur. “Most of our employees have gone on leave but we sent our existing staff to deliver food, but that too senior citizens or the ones in need,” he said.

Now that food delivery applications have resumed services, restaurants are hopeful that business would get better. “The cost of keeping the restaurant open at this time is going to be more expensive. But we are just rolling with the punches,” said Sandesh.

Provision delivery services like Big Basket began delivering goods to its customers who had placed orders before the curfew began.

(with inputs from C Suresh Kumar)

App-based food delivery services are permitted