A Twitter user named Rahul Mittal shared a clip of a young boy after he delivered food to his house in New Delhi. In his tweet, Rahul claimed that the boy was forced to work as a delivery agent after his father’s accident. Mittal captioned it, “This 7 year boy is doing his father job as his father met with an accident the boy go to school in the morning and after 6 he work as a delivery boy for @zomato we need to motivate the energy of this boy and help his father to get into feet #zomato”.
This 7 year boy is doing his father job as his father met with an accident the boy go to school in the morning and after 6 he work as a delivery boy for @zomato we need to motivate the energy of this boy and help his father to get into feet #zomato pic.twitter.com/5KqBv6OVVG
— RAHUL MITTAL (@therahulmittal) August 1, 2022
In this 29 second video Mr Mittal talks to the boy about why he is doing this work. Holding a box of chocolates in one hand, the kid can be seen explaining to the Twitter user about his working hours and that he uses a bicycle to deliver food to homes.
The boy told the Twitter user that he cycles door-to-door from 6 pm-11 pm to deliver food after he finishes school in the morning. After watching the video, some netizens got emotional and offered to help the boy.
A Zomato spokesperson said, “We are thankful to the internet community for bringing this to our notice. There are multifold violations here – child labour and misrepresentation, and we’ve educated the family on these grounds while not taking any strict action on this, keeping in mind the situation the family is in”.
He further added, “We have offered to support the 14-year-old’s education through the Zomato Future Foundation. The father onboarded on Zomato post his accident; therefore, the accidental support we offer to our active delivery partners cannot be extended to him. As an exception and on humanitarian grounds, our teams have extended whatever support was possible in the said situation”.
The video has crossed more than 204k views and received 3,644 likes.