>The food delivery startups could achieve the same if they paid their delivery drivers fairly (at the moment most don't even make minimum wage - compared to the

>The food delivery startups could achieve the same if they paid their delivery drivers fairly (at the moment most don't even make minimum wage - compared to the dabbawalas’ "good salary") A quick data check suggests that a software engineer in Mumbai can easily make literally ten times this "good salary". Would you consider paying food delivery workers in London 10% of an software engineer's pay packet a "good salary"? Fair treatment? Some crude calculations on my part suggest that it would be well below minimum wage in the UK. Is it possible that there might be more going on than "good salary"? Other commenters point out that there's a deep gulf in expected living conditions that enables such a low level of pay to be a "good salary". Taken together, these suggest to me that this is a model that exploits extreme poverty and inequality. One that perhaps we should be glad cannot be replicated in many other places.