Fast deliveries, slow thinking: Don’t blame the quick commerce model for failures of the state

Recently, India’s labour ministry stepped in, urging quick-commerce firms to tone down their ‘10-minute delivery’ pitch. Opposition parties and unions, sensing fertile political ground, have denounced the model itself.

What was once a niche discussion among venture capitalists and urban consumers has entered mainstream political discourse. This, in itself, is welcome. But the debate, as it stands, suffers from a fundamental confusion. It collapses the distinction between what markets are responsible for and what the state is obliged to do.

The great conflation: One part of the criticism relates to road safety. The argument goes something like this: faster deliveries mean more rushed riders, which means more accidents, which means quick commerce is unsafe and should be restrained.

This logic is fragile. India has had one of the worst road-safety records in the world for decades. India accounted for 1% of the world’s vehicles in 2021, but 11% of its road accidents. This is not because groceries arrive quickly in Bengaluru, Mumbai or Delhi. It is because of a lethal combination of poorly designed roads, corruption in transport departments, weak driver education, abysmal signage, potholes that appear overnight and traffic enforcement that is either absent or selectively present.

Union minister Nitin Gadkari has also acknowledged the role of a combination of these factors as the main reason for road accidents in India.

If the mere association with a hurried pace is enough to indict a business model, India should be rethinking fast retail payments— enabled by the much revered Unified Payments Interface—because of the transaction scams that such speed enables. Movement from point A to point B, efficiently and at scale, whether on physical or digital roads, is not a market failure. It is the definition of economic activity. Speed is not the enemy, lack of commensurate safeguards are.

Even under a minimal Hobbesian conception of the state, focused on preventing physical harm and disorder, ensuring safety in shared public spaces such as roads plausibly falls within its core functions. Outsourcing this function to private platforms because they are visible, successful and politically convenient is intellectual laziness.

Conversely, if this line of reasoning holds, why stop at road safety? Consider environmental regulation. India has an extended producer responsibility regime that makes manufacturers accountable for plastic waste. Fair enough.

But waste segregation and collection—the boring, unglamorous basics—are still absent in most urban neighbourhoods, the national capital included. Should FMCG companies be blamed for the state’s inability to provide municipal services? This pattern repeats endlessly. When enforcement fails, it’s tempting to preach to markets rather than fix institutions.

Businesses cannot be the state: This confusion extends to the proliferation of gig-worker cesses being introduced by various states, ostensibly for funding worker welfare. The idea sounds noble. But it’s instructive to look at how District Mineral Funds or Construction Workers’ Welfare Funds have been used.

Most well-intentioned funds are plagued by weak accountability and opaque deployment. Adding new levies while increasing friction for businesses is not reform. India already asks businesses to navigate bureaucratic inertia, slow dispute resolution and regulatory uncertainty.

Similarly, consider the case of lack of enforcement of minimum wages in traditional areas. Sectors like agriculture, construction, and manufacturing, which employ far more Indians than gig platforms ever will, are rife with violations. Yet, there is no minimum wage movement in these spaces because compliance can be gamed. Gig platforms, which are legally not equivalent to employers, are easier to beat with the proverbial stick.

Evidence counts: Political interventions must at least pass a basic evidentiary smell test. Recent union calls for gig workers to boycott deliveries on New Year’s eve had negligible impact. Delivery records were broken that very day across platforms.

This should prompt an uncomfortable question: Are these unions truly representative of young Indians trying to make ends meet in a country where 800 million rely on food subsidies yet aspire upward mobility in a brutally competitive smartphone-driven economy? Symbolic gestures may generate headlines, but they are no substitute for understanding how people survive.

At the end of the day, markets must be legally compliant. Businesses cannot be allowed to take consumers, vendors, employees or partners for granted, and if this means stricter standards for grievance redressal, so be it. But the state must do its job: enforce traffic laws, design safe roads, uphold labour standards and administer welfare funds transparently.

What we cannot do is take the easiest route: grabbing the fastest-growing and most visible businesses by the collar and asking them to fill in for institutional failure. If we continue down this path, we will eventually hollow out both the state and the market. And then, we really will have no one left to blame.

Disclosure: The authors advise ecommerce, payments and other digital businesses.

The authors are public policy experts at Koan Advisory, New Delhi.