You could soon order your favourite street food online through Swiggy

NEW DELHI: The urban affairs ministry and a major online food ordering and delivery platform have signed an MoU to enable street food vendors to tap a bigger market using the company’s ecommerce platform for more business.
To begin with, a pilot will be carried out involving 250 vendors across five cities — Ahmedabad, Chennai, Delhi, Indore and Varanasi — and this coverage will be expanded subsequently to other cities. The ministry said street vendors will be helped with PAN and FSSAI registration, training on technology and partner app usage, menu digitisation and pricing, hygiene and packaging best practices.

The ministry said the agreement was signed with Swiggy on Monday as a part of Prime Minister Street Vendor’s Atmanibhar Nidhi (PM SVANidhi) scheme under which urban street vendors are getting loans of up to Rs 10,000 at subsidised interest rate to help them resume their livelihoods which was adversely affected due to Covid-19 lockdown.

The scheme for easy finance was launched on June 1 with the target to benefit over 50 lakh street vendors who had been selling their eatables on or before March 24 in urban areas, including those from surrounding peri-urban and rural areas.

Till Sunday, over 20 lakh loan applications had been received under the scheme. Out of these over 7.5 lakh loans have been sanctioned and over 2.4 lakh loans already disbursed.