Many are not directly employed by companies like Amazon Flipkart and Myntra. (Reuters photo)

The festive season is already here. And, Diwali is just a few days away. This is the peak season for online shopping as well as for the delivery boys who traverse from one end of the city to the other dropping off everything from eye pencils and evening dresses to mixer-grinders and mobile phones. According to a report in news agency PTI, these boys of Flipkart, Amazon and other websites deliver up to 200 packages a day during peak shopping seasons. But do you know how much these delivery boys get for this job? The answer is less than Rs 20 per package! Also, as per company orders, all the packages must be delivered by 8 pm. Stressful? You bet!

Many are not directly employed by companies like Amazon, Flipkart and Myntra, but are ‘outsourced partners’, who come in handy during the festive season when the pressure to deliver is immense, as per PTI. Amazon, for instance, has 350 service partner nodes and 1,75,000 ‘I Have Space’ store partners across the country, in addition to those directly employed at their operational centres. A Myntra insider added that the company makes 1,000 temporary deployments during their festive sales and also has a MENSA (Myntra Extended Network Through Store Activation) network of close to 2,000 stores across India to enable deliveries.

PTI reports that with online portals offering irresistible Diwali sales, the delivery boys are on their toes – toiling for over 12 hours a day just to ensure that the package you’ve been waiting for reaches on time.

Amazon pays Rs 18 for the delivery of each packet, and Myntra and Jabong pay Rs 14, according to the PTI report.

While both Amazon and Myntra offer other benefits — hospitalization and accident insurance, night shift allowance, fuel reimbursement, and provident fund — to their directly employed delivery personnel, these don’t apply to ‘store owners’ like Nibesh. Responses to Flipkart went unanswered, reports PTI.

A delivery boy Nibesh says that he has to pay for the vehicle and the fuel, and also bear the cost of any damage or loss of package.