A female delivery agent ringing your doorbell isn’t very common still but clearly things are changing fast. Twenty one-year-old Chandni Rajput couldn’t care less as she zoomed past the Delhi traffic to make timely deliveries for Amazon.

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Earlier, people would be shocked to see a girl delivering a package but it’s changed over time, says Rajput, an Amazon delivery associate, who chose this to be her first job and has now spent three years doing it and has been enjoying it.

The 21-year-old, also training to be a beautician, soon wants to be more than a delivery agent. She can’t wait to begin her entrepreneurial journey. “Finally, I want to do something of my own, I want to start a business of my own. This is my dream and this is what I will do,” she told CNBC-TV18.

Young girls like Rajput are being supported by women like Manvi Dhawan, an Amazon Delivery Service Partner who decided to start her entrepreneurial journey right in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I worked across the telecom and banking sector handling call centre operations for almost 15 years. But then around 2013, I decided to take a sabbatical to take care of my children. They were really young at that time, but I was always clear that I have to come back and do something for myself,” Dhawan said.

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She found out about Amazon’s Delivery Service Partner programme. She started with one station in January 2021 and now handles seven.

As Dhawan made her way into the logistics business, she had to deal with drivers, contractors, delivery partners and warehouse staff who are mostly male, but she says it has never been a problem.

“It is a male dominant industry if you go by numbers, but Amazon has been extremely supportive and the kind of technology assistance they provide to us, the kind of logistic experience they have, they put everything in developing us as entrepreneurs. When I visit these stations, the participation of women is so well that I have never felt that I'm at a disadvantage as a female.”

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Explaining the process of delivery that she manages, she said, "to start with, the delivery load comes in three shifts and packages come here from all over the country through various fulfilment and sortation centres."

Once the load comes, it goes through the process of sorting, after which an internal algorithm routing is run for further segregating clusters into more dense routes, adding, "It becomes easier for the delivery associates to deliver faster and within the shift time. So once that is done, the bagging process starts wherein those packets move to packets of different days, then it's ready to be out on the door, the delivery associate will accept those packets on an app on their mobile, and they go off for delivery.”

‘A leap of faith is all you need’ — That’s what Dhawan believes… and it’s a belief she has passed on to many of the female delivery associates who work with her.

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Dhawan’s remarks came as this year, for International Women’s Day theme ‘Embrace Equity,’ Amazon India launched its second edition of ‘SheIsAmazon’ campaign aimed at highlighting “women who inspire, lead, innovate and deliver smiles to customers.”

Meanwhile, clearly entrepreneurship is on the rise in India. A report by Nasscom shows that in the last five years, more and more have taken the plunge to start something of their own. Today 18 percent of startups and 36 unicorns have women as co-founders.

(Edited by : Shoma Bhattacharjee)

First Published:Mar 6, 2023 7:41 PM IST