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Mumbai, Jan 23: Rashmi Sahijwala never expected to start working at the age of 59, let alone join India’s gig economy—now she is part of an army of housewives turning their homes into “cloud kitchens” to feed time-starved millennials.

Asia’s third-largest economy is battling a slowdown so sharp it is creating a drag on global growth, the International Monetary Fund said Monday, but there are some bright spots.

The gig economy, aided by cheap mobile data and abundant labour, has flourished in India, opening up new markets across the vast nation.

Although Indian women have long battled for access to education and employment opportunities, the biggest hurdle for many is convincing conservative families to let them leave home.

But new apps like Curryful, Homefoodi, and Nanighar are tapping the skills of housewives to slice, dice and prepare meals for hungry urbanites from the comfort of their homes.

The so-called cloud kitchens—restaurants that have no physical presence and a delivery-only model—are rising in popularity as there is a boom in food delivery apps such as Swiggy and Zomato.

“We want to be the Uber of home-cooked food,” said Ben Mathew, who launched Curryful in 2018, convinced that housewives were a huge untapped resource.

His company—which employs five people for the app’s daily operations—works with 52 women and three men, and the 31-year-old web entrepreneur hopes to get one million female chefs on-board by 2022.

“We usually train them in processes of sanitisation, cooking, prep time and packaging... and then launch them on the platform,” Mathew told news agency.

One of the first housewives to join Curryful in November 2018 shortly after its launch, Sahijwala was initially apprehensive, despite having four decades of experience in the kitchen.

But backed by her children, including her son who gave her regular feedback about her proposed dishes, she took the plunge.

Since then, she’s undergone a crash course in how to run a business, from creating weekly menus to buying supplies from wholesale markets to cut costs.

The learning curve was steep and Sahijwala switched from cooking everything from scratch to preparing curries and batters for breads in advance to save time and limit leftovers.

She even bought a massive freezer to store fruits and vegetables despite her husband’s reservations about the cost.

“I told him that I am a professional now,” she told news agency.

‘Internet restaurants’

Kallol Banerjee, co-founder of Rebel Foods which runs 301 cloud kitchens backing up 2,200 “internet restaurants”, was among the first entrepreneurs to embrace the concept in 2012.

“We could do more brands from one kitchen and cater to different customer requirements at multiple price points,” Banerjee told AFP.

The chefs buy the ingredients, supply the cookware and pay the utility bills.

The apps—which make their money through charging commission, such as more than 18 percent per order for Curryful—offer training and supply the chefs with containers and bags to pack the food in.

Curryful chef Chand Vyas, 55, spent years trying to set up a lunch delivery business but finally gave up after failing to compete with dabbawalas, Mumbai’s famously efficient food porters.

Today Vyas works seven hours a day, five days a week in her kitchen, serving up a bevy of Indian vegetarian staples, from street food favourites to lentils and rice according to the app’s weekly set menus.

“I don’t understand marketing or how to run a business but I know how to cook. So, the current partnership helps me focus on just that while Curryful takes care of the rest,” Vyas told AFP.

She pockets up to $150 (Rs 10,000 approx) a month after accounting for the commissions and costs, but hopes to earn more as the orders increase.

In contrast, a chef at a bricks-and-mortar restaurant takes home a monthly wage of between $300 (Rs 20,000 approx) and $1,000 (Rs 70,000) approx for working six days a week.

With India’s cloud kitchen sector expected to reach $1.05 billion by 2023, according to data platform Inc42, other companies are also keen to get a slice of the action.

Swiggy, for example, has invested 2.5 billion rupees ($35.3 million) in opening 1,000 cloud kitchens across the nation.

Back in her Mumbai kitchen, Sahijwala is elated to have embarked on a career at an age when her contemporaries are eyeing retirement.

Over the past year, she has seen her profit grow to $200 (Rs 15,000 approx) a month, but more importantly, she said, “My passion has finally found an outlet.

“I am just glad life has given me this chance.”

New Delhi, Jan 10: One woman reported a rape every 15 minutes on average in India in 2018, according to government data released on Thursday, underlining its dismal reputation as one of the worst places in the world to be female.

The highly publicised gang rape and murder of a woman in a bus in New Delhi in 2012 brought tens of thousands onto the streets across India and spurred demands for action from film stars and politicians, leading to harsher punishments and new fast-track courts. But the violence has continued unabated.

Women reported almost 34,000 rapes in 2018, barely changed from the year before. Just over 85% led to charges, and 27% to convictions, according to the annual crime report released by the Ministry of Home Affairs.

Women's rights groups say crimes against women are often taken less seriously, and investigated by police lacking insensitivity.

"The country is still run by men, one (female prime minister) Indira Gandhi is not going to change things. Most judges are still men," said Lalitha Kumaramangalam, former chief of the National Commission for Women.

"There are very few forensic labs in the country, and fast-track courts have very few judges," said Kumaramangalam, a member of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

The rape of a teenager in 2017 by former BJP state legislator Kuldeep Singh Sengar gained national attention when the accuser tried to kill herself the following year, accusing the police of inaction.

Five months before Sengar was convicted last December, the accuser's family had to be provided with security after a truck crashed into the car she was in, injuring her and killing two of her relatives.

A 2015 study by the Centre for Law & Policy Research in Bengaluru found that fast-track courts were indeed quicker, but did not handle a high volume of cases.

And a study in 2016 by Partners for Law in Development in New Delhi found that they still took an average of 8.5 months per case - more than four times the recommended period.

The government statistics understate the number of rapes as it is still considered a taboo to report rape in some parts of India and because rapes that end in the murder are counted purely as murders.

New Delhi, May 9: The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to consider a plea raising the issue of mass termination and the illegal salary cut of employees in IT/ITES/BPO/KPI by their employers during the lockdown due to the spread of the coronavirus.

A bench comprising Justices Ashok Bhushan, S.K. Kaul and B.R. Gavai, taking up the matter through video conferencing, agreed to examine the issue and listed it for May 15.

The petition, argued by senior advocate Devadatt Kamat, was filed by National Information Technology Employees Sena (NITES) through advocate-on-record Amit Pai, and sought implementation of directions issued by the Centre on March 29 and similar advisories issued by several other states mandating payment of wages/salaries to the employees and also directed not to terminate them during the period of lockdown.

A directive was issued by the Union Ministry of Labour and Empowerment to all Chief Secretaries of state governments to issue advisories to public and private companies to not lay off employees or implement pay cuts during lockdown.

In the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) report published on April 19, it was noted that "several companies across the country have started to terminate its employees without any reasonable cause and have started withholding their salaries. It is submitted that in such testing times, the rights of the employees ought to be protected by necessary orders/directions to the companies through the Respondents to effectively implement the lockdown and to contain the spread of the virus", said the plea.

On March 29, the Centre issued an order directing all states and Union Territories to issue orders, requiring all the employers in the industrial sector and shops and commercial establishments to pay wages on the due date without any deduction during their closure due to the lockdown.