After Swiggy, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs tied up with online food ordering platform Zomato on Thursday under the Prime Minister Street Vendor’’s AtmaNirbhar Nidhi (PM SVANidhi) scheme to onboard street food vendors on its food-tech platform. This will give street food vendors online access to thousands of consumers and help these vendors grow their businesses.
As per the MoU signed, initially MoHUA and Zomato will run a pilot program by on-boarding 300 vendors across six cities namely – Bhopal, Ludhiana, Nagpur, Patna, Raipur, Vadodara.The MoU with Zomato was exchanged between Shri Sanjay Kumar, Joint Secretary, MoHUA and Shri Mohit Sardana, Chief Operating Officer, Zomato, in the presence of Shri Durga Shanker Mishra, Secretary, MoHUA, and officials of Zomato and Ministry.
Zomato will provide PAN and FSSAI registrations, digitised menu, fix prices, train and certify vendors in food safety and hygiene, packaging, presentation and use of Zomato App, as part of the training process. It has been learnt that Zomato will upscale to 125 cities. As on February 4th, 2021, data collection of over 95,000 PMSVANidhi beneficiaries along with their 50, 000 family members is done.
In December last year, Swiggy announced the expansion of its street food vendors program to 125 cities under the PM SVANidhi scheme. In the first phase, the company will onboard 36,000 street food vendors to whom the loan has been disbursed in 125 cities on its platform. The PM SVANidhi Scheme was launched under the ambit of ‘AtmaNirbhar Bharat Abhiyan’. It aims at facilitating collateral free working capital loans upto `10,000 of 1 year tenure, to about 50 lakh street vendors in the urban areas, including those from the surrounding peri-urban/ rural areas, to resume their businesses post COVID-19 lockdown. Incentives in the form of interest subsidy of 7% per annum on regular repayment of loan, cashback upto `1,200 per annum on undertaking prescribed digital transactions and eligibility for enhanced next tranche of loan have also been provided.