Bangalore has turned into a war zone in the last week. All thanks to the Supreme Court judgement favouring Tamil Nadu on the Kaveri water sharing issue. The city has been facing sporadic violence and forces have been called in to rein in the situation. Some parts of the city have also been placed under curfew.
These problems have toppled ecommerce activities. Bangalore is headquarters to major ecommerce companies like Flipkart and Amazon, grocery services like BigBasket, and cab aggregators like Ola and Uber. Needless to say, all their activities are severely minimised and the companies are bearing monetary losses.
‘We are closed’
A worried Neeraj Aggarwal, head of supply chain operations at Flipkart says,
“We have stalled operations because safety of our delivery staff remains our top priority. As we hope the situation to get better soon, we are trying to mitigate all customer impact by keeping them informed about expected delays.”
An Amazon spokesperson stated,
“Owing to the situation in Bangalore, the delivery of products is temporarily impacted. We will resume deliveries at the earliest.”
“Lots of people entered our warehouse and asked us to shut down, but they were not violent. Yeshwantpur hubs, etc, have also been closed for the past two days. Practically from yesterday lunch-time, lots of orders have come in but fulfillment is an issue. They entered our customer service building in Koramangala, so we had to shut that down,” said Hari Menon.
Food delivery app Swiggy has announced the following on its app:
“Owing to disturbance in Bangalore, we have halted our operations for now.”
Long term repercussions
Most start-ups choose Bangalore because of its mild weather and fairly peaceful environment. After the recent events, many are changing their opinion. A fuming Pranav Goel, CEO of Porter, a logistics firm says,
“We shifted our base from Mumbai to Bangalore just recently. With the number of bandhs and protests over the past six months, we are considering moving back.”
No doubt that the political and social climate of a place will decide its development in commerce and industry. Some companies can choose to shift base, but there is a lot at stake for those who have their primary operations in Bangalore. If the volatile conditions continue, the losses for ecommerce companies will only go up.
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