IIT Delhi Research Outlines Fair Compensation for Food Delivery Agents in India

The research team at IIT Delhi has developed 'Work4Food'. This not only ensures that delivery workers receive government-mandated minimum wage compensations but also aims to reduce platform expenses while maintaining high customer satisfaction levels. Check complete details here 

IIT Delhi Research Outlines Fair Compensation for Food Delivery Agents in India

The research team of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi have crafted 'Work4Food' to ensure delivery workers get minimum wage and reduce platform costs while ensuring customer satisfaction. Their proposal was also presented at the prestigious International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. 

Work4Food's minimum income guarantee, coupled with the flexibility it offers to platforms in onboarding delivery agents based on demand-supply dynamics, minimizes unnecessary travel - a common practice among the delivery agents to strategically position themselves for the next order. 

Key features of Work4Food

• Income Guarantees: The scheme ensures that all delivery agents receive income guarantees based on government-mandated minimum wage rates, allowing them to earn a fair and consistent income.
• Platform Control: The formulation provides platforms with the necessary flexibility to determine the number of delivery workers onboarded, ensuring that income guarantees are met while addressing operational constraints.
• Personalized Guarantees: The scheme takes into account worker-specific factors and performance metrics, besides the demand-supply dynamic in particular localities, to provide personalized guarantees tailored to each delivery worker.

“In our work, we developed an order assignment algorithm (which determines which delivery person gets which order) to ensure that each delivery person earns more than the minimum wage. To achieve this without increasing the cost for the platform or the consumer, we recommend utilizing the delivery workers more efficiently and reducing the habit of over-provisioning. In other words, since the platforms gather a lot of data, by looking at historical patterns, they can predict the supply-demand dynamics in a particular location at a particular time and accordingly onboard delivery workers if there is a need”, said Prof. Abhijnan Chakraborty, Computer Science and Engineering Department, IIT Delhi.

India's Food Delivery Sector

Fairwork India's 2023 report highlighted a crucial problem in India's food delivery sector: major platforms fail to offer hourly local minimum wages to delivery workers once fuel and additional expenses are considered. Fairwork Project is a global initiative that seeks to improve the working conditions of digital platform workers, including food delivery riders. The project assesses and ranks platform companies based on their adherence to fair labour practices to promote better standards in the gig economy. 

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