Swiggy, the online delivery platform for food delivery, has announced to recruit 3 lakh people in the next 18 months. If this happens, the number of employees of Swiggy will be around 5 lakhs. Swiggy has claimed that this will make it the third largest employer in the country after Army and Railways.
Addressing Gigabytes, an Annual technology conference, Swiggy co-founder and CEO Sriharsha Mazeti said, "If our growth projections continue, within the next few years we will become the third major employer after the Army and Indian Railways."
Significantly, till March 2018, the Indian Army has given employment to about 12.5 lakh people and about 12 lakh employees are employed in the Railways. So far, IT company TCS has given the maximum employment to 4.5 lakh employees in the private sector. If Swiggy increases its workforce to 5 lakhs, it will become the largest employer in the private sector.
However, there is a difference between the jobs of the remaining three departments-companies and Swiggy. In other companies, there is full-time employment in the employees and all kinds of benefits are available. But Swiggy recruit more blue collar jobs and delivery boys, who get money according to their work. Swiggy has 2.1 lakh active delivery staff and around 8,000 permanent corporate employees.
Swiggy's rival company Zomato had 2.3 lakh delivery executives according to September data. The legendary online retail company Flipkart has 1 lakh delivery executives. According to a Times of India news, Amazon India does not disclose the number of its executives.
Majetti said that in the next 10-15 years, the company aims to get 10 crore active customers who visit its platform at least 15 times a month. Significantly, Swiggy is a company valued at about $ 3.3 billion and is active in around 500 cities in India. About 50 crore orders are placed from its platform every year.
The biggest investor in this is the South African company Naspers. The company is preparing to launch such unique cloud kitchen 'pods', in which food items of many restaurants will be ready in one place and thus will be easily delivered within 10 minutes.