KARACHI:
While ordering food between university lectures or during late-night study sessions, I constantly notice how delivery riders are exploited. As online shopping and food delivery apps expand, these riders have become essential to daily life, yet many still work under unfair conditions. Delivery riders work long hours in extreme weather and heavy traffic to ensure timely deliveries. Despite these risks, most receive low wages and face strict delivery deadlines. Delays caused by traffic, accidents or weather — factors beyond their control — often result in financial penalties or poor ratings that affect their future employment.
The pressure to complete more deliveries in less time pushes many riders to drive recklessly, endangering their own lives and the safety of everyone else on the road. Most also lack the basic protections any of us would expect from a job: health insurance, paid sick leave, compensation in the event of an accident, and even the security of knowing they’ll still have work next month. If a rider is injured, the medical bills and lost income are often theirs alone to absorb, even though the platforms they ride for could not function without them.
As customers, we bear some responsibility too. It is easy to snap at a rider over a late order without pausing to consider what conditions delayed it. A little patience and the basic courtesy of treating a rider as a person rather than a delivery mechanism cost us nothing but can change someone’s entire day.
Real change, however, has to come from the top. The government and delivery companies must work together to ensure fair wages, realistic delivery targets, insurance coverage and safer working conditions for these workers. Stronger labour protections and clearer, more transparent company policies are not favours, they are basic dignities that have been overlooked for too long.
It is time we stopped seeing delivery riders as invisible service providers and started recognising them as hardworking individuals who deserve fairness, respect and protection. As a student who relies on these services as much as anyone, I believe addressing this exploitation is not just a policy matter — it is a test of what kind of society we want to be.
Syeda Alvina Shah
Karachi
