Meet the cyclists sweating it out for Zomato’s sustainability goals

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Editor's note: Close to midnight on 13 May, D* decided to head home. It was his first day as a bicycle delivery partner with Zomato, and he was dog-tired. The temperature had crossed 40°C that afternoon and he’d messed up his seventh order of the day—in New Delhi’s Chattarpur area. After mistakenly marking the order as “picked up” on the app, he had trouble locating the restaurant. The order was assigned to another partner. At a traffic light, D held up his phone, bought just a month before, to get his bearings. In the blink of an eye it was gone, snatched by three men on a motorcycle. “It was my first day,” says D, who’d spent Rs 13,000 on the phone—way more than what he hoped to earn in a month at Zomato—and hadn’t purchased a holder for it yet. A school dropout, he had run through a string of low-paying jobs in shops and factories before hearing about Zomato. Since he couldn’t afford a motorcycle, he settled on a bicycle that would help him earn money with a low upfront …