We are an equal opportunity platform: Swiggy on demand for non-Muslim delivery worker

Days after a screenshot of a Swiggy customer in Hyderabad asking the food delivery startup to not send a Muslim executive for delivering their order went viral on social media, Swiggy responded by calling itself ‘an equal opportunity platform’. It also clarified that such requests are not considered as the assignment of delivery workers is fully automated.

Responding to a tweet from Mahua Moitra, the West Bengal MP from the All India Trinamool Congress, Swiggy said, “Hey Mohua, as an equal opportunity platform, there is no place for discrimination in Swiggy’s delivery universe. The assignment of orders is entirely automated and does not take any such requests into consideration.”

“We’ve been attempting to validate the authenticity and recency of the screenshot to get more information since the incident was first reported a few days ago,” the clarification further stated.

Earlier, Moitra had raised her voice on Twitter against the blatant discrimination on religious lines and asked Swiggy to blacklist the customer, make their name public & also lodge a police complaint against the said customer.

“Sickening to see normalisation of hatred & bigotry – what would earlier be hidden personal prejudices now become proud public proclamations of majoritarianism,” she had tweeted.

The incident was first brought to light on September 30 by Shaik Salauddin, the national general secretary of Indian Federation of App Based Transport Workers, a worker’s organisation representing app-based transport and delivery workers.

“Dear @Swiggy please take a stand against such a bigoted request. We (Delivery workers) are here to deliver food to one and all, be it Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh,” he said.

This is not the first incident where customers have asked food delivery firms to not send delivery executives belonging to a particular religion, particularly Muslims.

In July 2019, a man idetifying himself as Amit Shukla from Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh, had cancleed his order on Zomato after he got to know that the delivery partner was a Muslim.

“Just cancelled an order on @ZomatoIN they allocated a non hindu rider for my food they said they can’t change rider and can’t refund on cancellation I said you can’t force me to take a delivery I don’t want don’t refund just cancel,” he said on Twitter.

Shukla went on to the extent of threatening legal action against alleging that the food delivery firm was forcing people to take deliveries from people they did not want to and that the firm was not refunding the money.

Responding to the online controversy, Zomato refused to change the delivery executive and said they fully stand behind their executives.

Zomato’s founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal, too, refused to buckle under the online pressure and said, “We are proud of the idea of India – and the diversity of our esteemed customers and partners. We aren’t sorry to lose any business that comes in the way of our values.”

Stay on top of technology and startup news that matters. Subscribe to our daily newsletter for the latest and must-read tech news, delivered straight to your inbox.