Coronavirus: Start-Ups Step Up to Help During Lockdown
Coronavirus has taken centre stage in the lives of all humans across the world. Due to the contagious nature of the pandemic, the government has lockdown all places such as theatres, malls, Gyms, and almost every shop except essential shops like medical, grocery shop, medical and others. Due to the lockdown, people have been facing a lot of issues. In order to improve the issues, a lot of start-ups have stepped up to help people.
Zomato
India’s one of the leading food aggregators and delivery platform Zomato is running a campaign called “Feed the Daily Wager”. In this campaign, they are providing food support to daily wager communities. Basically, the company is helping those people who are currently cannot afford their meals. According to Zomato, “We have made ration kits containing wheat flour or rice and two types of pulses required for a family of 5 for one whole week.”
The kit is delivered to location across multiple cities. During the three week-lockdown, there are a lot of supply chains that have got disruption in different sectors, start-ups such as Zomato have stepped up with different initiatives to support the government and the during this time.
InnerChef
Rajesh Sawhney (Co-Founder of cloud kitchen platform inner Chef) has converted their cloud kitchens into community facilities to offer foods for poor people. According to livemint, he said, “The poorest must be fed. Cloud kitchens can be converted into community kitchens should the government enable it. InnerChef offers all its kitchens at a not-profit basis to the authorities in Delhi, Noida, Gurugram, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Mumbai.” Several other domains also have come up with their own idea to help in different ways.
Pitstops
Pitstops, doorsteps car service & repairs provider, according to entrepreneur.com, The founder of Pitstop Mihir Mohan is running a campaign in nine major cities like Bengaluru, Mumbai, and Gurugram and many others. Their campaign name is called #AtYourService. They are serving on the front lines, without taking service and labour charge. The company has closed all doorstep services until the end of the lockdown period.
The company is working with few garage partners and doorstep van teams, they are helping form grocery and food delivery personnel to medicine, whoever using vehicle and having a problem can call on their office number 6262621234. After getting lockdown, one major part of the landscape has seen an enormous request surge is the food supply chain. Since the announcement, despite the repeated appeal, the majority of people went on to hoard essential supplies, which may create problems for other consumers, and even retailers.
Ninjacart
Indian’s largest fresh produce supply chain company Ninjacart is working directly to deliver fruits and vegetables to the apartments and societies. Co-founder of this company Thiru wrote on the twitter “NinjaCart planning to supply Veg & Fruits directly to apartments/societies to help people during the lockdown. We want someone to aggregate the orders, take the delivery & give it to people who ordered.”
GrabbnGO
GrabbnGO, the start-up offer food delivery service at boarding gates inside airports, has created an app to support local retail stores. People can easily order their groceries and opt for a drive-through, that may reduce the crowd in grocery shops. For stores with essential things and manpower, people can also select to get the order home delivery. As per entrepreneur.com, the company is trying to approach the Gov. so that the service can reach to big amount of people.
Zypp
E-scoter rental platform Zypp had proclaimed before the lockdown, that they would deliver its scooters directly to the customers’ premises in Gurugram. As per entrepreneur.com, scooters will be fully sanitized before the delivery.
Stanza Living
The outbreak and subsequent lockdown have created trouble for a lot of people and student who work or studies in different cities or state. By PG or Hostel managers, they are being asked to leave. However, Coliving provider Stanza Living is helping those such kinds of people and also offering service to the government to covert the rooms into a quarantine facility in case they needed.
“There have been reports about people being asked to vacate their hostels/PGs especially in cities including Hyderabad, Bangalore, Pune. We have been supporting those how are stranded, by offering accommodation at our residences with immediate effect,” the company said.
Everest Fleet
The fleet management company Everest Fleet is providing emergency ride in the Mumbai city. Actually, the company is offering cab rides to frontline helpers, medical patients, and necessary service providers, among the others. The co-founder of this Start-up Siddharth Ladsariya gave a statement to ET digital, “Since the lockdown was introduced and with Ola & Uber suspended operations, we started receiving several calls from our references for the requirement of transport services for going to the hospital, banks, etc.”
At the time E-commerce space such as Amazon, Flipkart and even smaller companies like Paytm Mall have closed the door for non-essential products. During this outbreak, you can only order groceries and sanitizers. ShopClues has said this online platform is providing essential things like masks, sanitizers, packed foods, medicines, and personal hygiene products.
