April 2024 – The recent move by meal delivery service Zomato to create a special fleet for delivering vegetarian cuisine—depicted by green jerseys rather than the customary red shirts—was met with strong criticism, with many characterizing it as overt casteism. The restaurant aggregator quickly abandoned their colour-coding scheme in response to strong criticism in order to shield its red-clad delivery staff from possible abuse.
In her Mrs. Funnybones column in the Times of India, Twinkle Khanna compared the art of communication to building a rope bridge. She pointed out that sometimes, even after carefully aiming and tying a rock to the string to give it weight, it might fall into a ravine or strike the other person’s head and cause a rift.
Conclusion
She went on to say that Zomato was the product of successful entrepreneurs who saw an unmet need, supplied it, and turned a profit. She said that the “segregation of food into pure and impure” was the root of the problem. While the move appeared to be a solution for people with “specific dietary requirements” on the surface, Twinkle claimed that underneath that veneer, the Zomato community “forgot” that the term “pure-veg,” in contrast to vegetarianism or veganism, “has connotations of caste, hierarchy and untouchability.”
