MC making efforts to register street food vendors with Zomato, SwiggyNow, order your favourite street food at home

Charanjit Singh Teja

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Tribune News Service

Amritsar, October 5

Residents can now enjoy street food at the comfort of their home as food-delivery firms — Zomato and Swiggy — are going to get street vendors on board in the city.

The estate wing of the Municipal Corporation (MC) is making efforts to register street vendors with Zomato and Swiggy under the Prime Minister Street Vendor’s AtmaNirbhar Nidhi (PM SVANidhi) Scheme.

In February this year, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) had joined hands with these companies for home delivery of street food in six cities to bring street food vendors on its food-tech platform.

Now, more cities have been added to the programme and Amritsar is one of them, said an Estate Officer.

Jaswinder Singh Nodal, the officer on street vending project, said, “The Centre had launched the PM SVANidhi to provide Rs10,000 to street vendors as initial working capital to revive their businesses, which suffered setback in the wake of Covid-19 outbreak. We have registered 15,000 street vendors of which 5,600 got the loan from various banks. Now, the government has asked to register street vendors with various welfare schemes. The project to bring street vendors on board has also been initiated. We are searching for eligible vendors.”

The MC has been facing several issues as a large number of food vendors don’t have smartphones or are not tech savvy. No one has a food safety certificate and are also not comfortable with collecting money through online transactions. They fear that the government will impose tax on them. The estate wing offices of the MC constituted a team to elaborate the project to vendors and representatives of Zomato and Swiggy would also motivate vendors to complete the formalities to register with their firms.

The food delivery firms and the MC would help street vendors in getting PAN and FSSAI registration, training on technology, usage of applications, menu digitisation and pricing, hygiene and packaging best practices.