In Mumbai, they say, time is money. It’s also said that you can make it here even if you start with nothing. By 8.30 on a November morning, therefore, 24-year-old Raju Thakur had already done the following: got ready, made his lunch (rice, dal, onion pakoras), packed his bag, and taken a two-hour bus ride from the industrial suburb of Kandivali West to Bandra West, an old neighbourhood of cobblestoned streets and picturesque churches that is home to chic scenesters and creative startups.

For over a year now, Thakur has been working for a Bandra-based startup that offers to serve the everyday needs of a new class of affluent urban Indians who don’t want the encumbrance of full-time runners, or peons, as the all-purpose “boys” working in households and offices in South Asia have been called since the time the British governed here. “Every day we help people emerge above the pain of running mundane errands and help them find more time to do things they love the most,” goes the mission statement of Russsh. Initially called “Get My Peon” to tap into the appeal of a personal boy for petty chores, the four-year-old company recently expanded its services to include pretty much anything anyone with disposable income in Mumbai would want done, from party planning to customised assistance for expats.

The idea is to offer India’s growing salaried class a luxury that used to be the preserve of the old-moneyed in India, but with one vital difference: unlike their predecessors, for whom it was a job for life, the peons of the new generation are using it to get ahead.

Thakur delivers a package of high-end clothing. Photograph: Karen Dias for the Guardian

Thakur is doing the job because it’s “respectable work”, he tells me as we leave his bright-walled, open-plan office at 9.30am for his first assignment of the day, a pick-up at Sakinaka, a neighbourhood away to the north. Thakur, a lean young man with an angular face and sharp eyes, is dressed in the company T-shirt with a black backpack containing his lunch, waterbottle and receipt book. We rush on to a bus to reach the nearest stop on the city’s local train service, which carries 7.5 million people around the ever-growing city every day. As the bus hurtles past trendy cafes and street vendors, Thakur tells me that when he saw an advertisement for the job in a local newspaper, he was working for a recovery agency collecting payments from defaulting customers. The new job offered only marginally better pay, but Thakur was attracted to what seemed to be a new kind of work culture.

His company pitched itself with the irresistible tagline of “get your own peon”, but the official designation it gives its young men is “errand executive”. It’s a term loaded with everything that would attract a dreamer in the new India: sophistication, responsibility, the prospect of growth, respect. “What we were looking for is people who had studied up to sixth or seventh standard,” says Bharat Ahirwar, Russsh’s 31-year-old founder. “They didn’t need to speak fluent English, but they should be able to read it to make sense of the addresses. People who would otherwise have been working as random office boys, we give incentives and opportunities to progress within the company. You’re not cleaning tables or making tea. A client can’t yell at you.”

Mumbai ... the dismantling of the old way of life is creating opportunities for entrepreneurs who can spot a service gap

We are sitting in his office, artfully spare but with quirky touches, like a miniature bucket as a pen stand and a bookshelf (the India Lonely Planet is visible on it, and 501 Must-See Movies.) Ahirwar is something of a compulsive entrepreneur. His work history includes managing exotic dancers from Russia and Switzerland, and helping expats settle in Mumbai: “I would help them buy a house, get curtains, get an internet connection, buy groceries.”

The more he worked with high-income people in Mumbai, Ahirwar says, the more he realised the potential for a service that rented out peons at an hour or two’s notice. “Today I’ve three types of clients. The first is individuals who are employed somewhere [the category the company gets most of its work from]. There was this corporate guy, he called us because he was getting to his office for a day of meetings and realised he had torn his shoes, so he wanted my guy to go to his house, get a clean pair of shoes and deliver them to his office. He also wanted the broken shoes mended and dropped off back at the house.”

The second category is new-age entrepreneurs: “Stylists, bakers, food industry people, art galleries, startups, branding ventures.” The third – and most lucrative – is big corporate houses. “We’ve contracts with two so far: Pepsi and Disney. We have put errand desks in both the offices. For two to four hours every day, two of our guys sit at these desks, and whatever the companies’ employees have to get done, they drop it at the desk – bills, groceries, bank work.”

‘I’ve three types of clients’ ... Russsh founder Bharat Ahirwar at work in the office. Photograph: Karen Dias for the Guardian

As the fourth biggest startup centre in the world, India is at the point where the gradual dismantling of the old way of life – where a whole class of people took care of the daily needs of the well-off – is leading to opportunities for entrepreneurs who can spot a service gap and provide quick solutions. Every few days, there is something new one can get done with a tap of the smartphone screen, from ordering a bag of onions from the local grocer to getting food delivered from the closest willing cook.

At about 10.30am, the train halts at the Andheri stop and we zip through littered corridors and packed staircases to the Metro line that will take us to Sakinaka. Since Thakur dropped out of college a few years ago, every job he has done has required him to run around the city. He’s proud of how well he knows Mumbai, he tells me as we settle into our carriage. Thakur was born in Mumbai, but his father came to the city, like millions of others from all over the country, to make a living. The family is from a village near the small town of Sitamarhi in Bihar, east India. Over time, Mumbai’s politics has come to centre on the tension between “natives” and migrants: riots erupt with predictable frequency. Thakur’s opinion is unsurprising. He tells me – eyes constantly flicking to his phone – that everyone should get a chance in Mumbai.

Over 100,000 young men like him keep up the delivery network of India’s near–$20bn ecommerce economy, dispatching 5 million orders a month around the country for a salary of 6,000 to 12,000 rupees (£60-120). For most it’s an exploitative job, from the loads they have to bear to the distances they have to travel. In July, 400 of them went on strike in Mumbai to demand basic rights, such as regular days off and a laundry allowance for their uniforms. But while Thakur’s brief might be the same as that of an average delivery boy, he says he is more than a pair of legs to his company.

Thakur checks his phone for the next task. . Photograph: Karen Dias for the Guardian

His pick-up point is a breathless, 15-minute walk from the Metro stop, a fourth-floor walk-up in a well-worn apartment building. By the time the door opens, Thakur is ready with his introduction. In what becomes the pattern of the day, betraying the old fear of the working class, the door opens just enough to hand over the parcel and slip out the cash – 200 rupees for a pick-up and delivery. The parcel contains dehydrated packets of Indian lunch food such as rajma-chawal and chicken biryani, to be passed on to another link in the complex supply chain for big office buildings’ pre-packaged lunches. We deliver the bag to a similar building in Khar – a district back towards the south, and which requires another complex commute involving a bus, a train and an auto-rickshaw.

The moment Thakur finishes one errand he is supposed to call his office for the next. Back in the office, a “logistics” person tracks the movement of all 30 peons and distributes tasks – the company is developing software that will handle this operation. The next thing in the pipeline is a mobile phone app accessible in both English and Hindi – Uber, but for servants – and after that they will expand the operation to other cities such as Delhi and Bangalore. “The aim is to target just about everyone in the cities with a cellphone,” says Ahirwar. “We’re already doing stuff like having bikes picked up and repaired,” says Kabir Ahuja, his partner in the company. “One of our guys even applied for a wedding date at the registrar for a couple who was planning to get married but didn’t have the time to do official formalities.”

By 1pm, Thakur is on to his second assignment. We eat lunch and board a train for Lower Parel, once the home of Mumbai’s hundred textile mills, replaced now by a stunning concentration of gleaming corporate towers. It’s behind one of these that Thakur spots his pick-up location, on the seventh floor of a residential apartment complex. This time the door opens and a hand comes out with a large shopping bag and a slip with the delivery address. Then the door opens a little wider and a young woman peeks out at Thakur. “Um, would you be able to buy a brown paper bag and put the dress in it? It looks really odd otherwise,” she tells him. It’s a designer dress to be delivered to the winner of a social media contest hosted by a lifestyle website, and as the social media manager for the website, it’s her job to see it through.

Thakur doesn’t reply; he nods obediently instead. As we walk back to the station, he tells me that he is working on his English. His rise in this new world, he knows, will require proficiency in the language. He has bought the popular Rapidex English Learner and spends an hour or two every day practising “sentences of daily use”. He has also been learning to use the computer, mainly by buying hourly slots at cyber cafes near his home, and is quite comfortable with the internet. Customers often place requests on the company’s Facebook and Twitter pages, and that’s also where they post their feedback: Thakur was named the company’s “online star” in October.

Thakur fills out a receipt after delivering a box of cakes. Photograph: Karen Dias for the Guardian

By 3.30pm, Thakur has delivered the dress, up north, in Santa Cruz. After another call to the office, he has the last assignment of the day, picking up and delivering cupcakes in the southern tip of Mumbai – the traditionally affluent part of the city, flanked by a fresh-smelling bay, boasting ornate Victorian-gothic architecture, and known to its old-money residents simply as “Town”. Circulating cakes – birthday cake, wedding cake, anniversary cake – around the city is a routine errand for Thakur and his colleagues, an easy job that even entitles them to a taxi, to keep the cakes in shape.

By 5.30pm he is done for the day, and we take the train back to the office, where he hands over the cash and receipts. Once back home he goes to buy vegetables, makes dinner and eats while watching his favourite news debate show, spends some time chatting with friends on Facebook and on his battered old Nokia, and then goes to sleep.

Thakur wants to complete a hundred errands over the month so he can win an incentive reward. He doesn’t have much use for the money himself, he tells me. He laid the first salary of his life at his mother’s feet, he says, and still gives her whatever money he brings home at the end of the month. The only thing he needs, and is saving for, is an Android-enabled smartphone, paid for in instalments. It should have GPS, so he won’t have to wander around looking for addresses, and WhatsApp, so he can chat with friends on his long commutes. For now, though, Thakur wants to focus on performance. “If you do well, you could be promoted to a position where you take the bookings, you could move on to the logistics department, then to being a supervisor, to perhaps heading a branch someday.”

While it has never been easier for people in India to transcend the boundaries of caste and class, the income gap between the comfortably off and the rich is greater than ever. Upward mobility for Thakur is not about making his way up to the drawing rooms of the people who deal with him through half-open doors, but about having a better life.

When I talk to him again, some time later, it is over WhatsApp. I ask if he managed to buy a smartphone after all. “Oh that was eight months ago,” he says. “It’s already old for me.”