India has an “entrenched culture of outsourcing household work”, said Reuters, with domestic help traditionally organised through word of mouth and paid in cash. But new apps are changing the practice and turning the system digital.
Although the start-ups offer attractive fees for clients alongside competitive earnings for workers, concerns around safety will be harder to pay off.
Attractive numbers
Start-ups like Urban Company, Pronto and Snabbit are offering on-demand bookings in cities for short tasks, entering a “vast, largely unregulated market” that boasts an estimated 30 million domestic workers. It includes many women with “few formal job options”, said the BBC.
The model of the agencies works a bit like Uber: the helpers get bookings, pointing them to jobs in homes in designated neighbourhoods on their apps. They press a countdown timer in the app before they start work.
The numbers are currently attractive for both clients and workers: companies are “betting big” and “burning millions of dollars” to “lure busy professionals” with charges of less than 99 rupees (79p) an hour that “have no global parallel”, said Reuters. For instance, similar services can cost around £22 an hour in the US, and around £5 in China.
In a country with a per capita income of around £2,200, workers on these apps can see annual earnings reach £3,700 by working eight hours a day. “My income has roughly doubled,” a 32-year-old from West Bengal, who worked through Snabbit, told the Indian Express.
Greater risks
So far, so good. But the “craze” is “tempered by concerns” about women’s safety in a country with “high rates of sexual harassment”. Unlike delivery drivers who spend “just brief moments at doorsteps”, the workers may spend hours inside private homes, “exposing them to greater risks”, said Reuters.
Pronto and Snabbit have an SOS button within the app that alerts area supervisors in case of emergency. Pronto also offers self-defence training for workers. Urban Company says it offers a women-only safety helpline and an SOS app feature.
But a women’s rights activist noted that while the companies run extensive background checks on workers before hiring them, they don’t vet the credentials of customers, who can simply log in on apps to book home help.
In between bookings, the workers “have only the cold, dusty sidewalk to sit on” and for some, the uniforms they wear are “visible identifiers that they’d rather not have”, said The Indian Express. One worker said there “should be a place for us to change back into regular clothes” because “many of us don’t want everyone to know what we do”.
It would be to the advantage of the platforms if they could “successfully crack the safety protocols” because they will “earn the deepest consumer loyalty” and “the most sustainable market returns”, Soumya Chauhan, a principal at Dutch e-commerce investor Prosus, which has a stake in Urban Company, told Reuters.