As a journalist, you quickly realise, to your dismay, that the better stories come from off-the-cuff conversations, and the best ones from off-the-record (OtR) chats. And so it happened in Mumbai a few days ago. According to OtR chats, a startup wanted to enter a new segment, in which the first foray had been made by an absolutely new entity just a few months ago. As the OtR story goes, the entry into the new segment was made by the former around the time the founder of the latter was getting married. The thinking was that the wedding would prevent the latter’s founder from responding immediately.
If you think the above OtR story has anything to do with the business of organising house help services using digital platforms, it is strictly your own conjecture; we have not said anything to that effect. What we do want to say is that it is nothing short of magical to see how services that touch our everyday lives are being transformed with deployment of digital technologies. We had barely stopped marvelling at the phenomenon called quick commerce and already the great gig in town is to organise that most unorganised of all segments: House help, or what can probably be called—in the same vein as ecommerce and q-commerce—h-commerce. And the gloves are off already: Every densely populated colony is a battlefield, every founder’s wedding an opportunity.
House help has been a ticklish area for households, especially urban ones where both husband and wife (or partners) go to work. A help calling in sick or not turning up without intimation can send everything off kilter. In this writer’s experience, help not turning up draws the same response from the missus as the morning when her iPhone stopped working without warning. Not to put too fine a point on it, these are times when tempers run high and chaos reigns.
It is, therefore, calming to know that help can arrive in a few minutes or a couple of hours—depending on the digital platform of your choosing—should you need one in a hurry. And they are usually well-groomed, well-mannered, show accountability in the way they care about ratings, and payment is standard and smooth.
What is the big deal, you might ask. Similar things have happened in ecommerce (starting with delivery of books), cabs, handymen, beauticians and all sorts of other things. Well, it is a big deal if you come to think of the h factor in h-commerce.
The key to delivery of services that come to you digitally is, well, the delivery, for which speed, quality and reliability matter. So, warehouses and delivery people came to the fore. The dawn of q-commerce took it a step further by making dark stores—mini distribution centres dedicated to fulfilling online orders that receive no consumers—the centrepiece of their strategy. But you cannot possibly stock human beings like grocery or detergent. So, how do you make sure that a cleaner, cook or babysitter arrives at the service seeker’s doorstep quickly enough? That a domestic help comes inside your home and spends time there, instead of merely dropping a package outside the door, adds its own dimension.
That is where technology comes in, to ensure availability, quality and safety for the household as well as for the service professional. The last bit is just as important, if not more. Any reader of the city pages in newspapers would know of horror stories about how helpless house help are exploited to within an inch of their death or insanity.
Suveen SinhaEditor, Forbes IndiaEmail: suveen.sinha@nw18.comX ID: @suveensinha
First Published: Sep 15, 2025, 11:34
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