Coronavirus: MyGate Partners With E-Commerce Firms For Contactless Deliveries The start-up has attempted to replace human interaction with alert calls as the number of positive cases in India continue to rise

As social distancing has become increasingly important in the wake of the coronavirus disease outbreak, MyGate has partnered with Swiggy, Zomato, Licious, Grofers, Dunzo and other leading e-commerce companies to enable contactless deliveries of essential services. The company's leave-at-gate feature has been made available to all the 1.5 million homes on its platform. Over 7,000 gated communities on MyGate can now also elect to make it mandatory for their residents to pick up parcels at the gate.

"Contactless deliveries are an extremely important practice right now, and we're honored to enable safer deliveries for our users and the lakhs of delivery executives who allow Indian households to retain a degree of normalcy during these testing times," said Vijay Arisetty, chief executive officer & co-founder of MyGate, in a statement.

The company said this is in response to the change in behavior at both ends of the delivery process, as residents and delivery executives seek to maintain social distance to the maximum extent possible. Even prior to the Janta Curfew on Sunday, a significant shift was noticed in user behavior over collection of home deliveries at communities where the feature was already in use.

Over the seven days, the leave-at-gate feature saw a 3.5x increase in usage. The utility of this feature has previously been used by residents only to receive parcels while away from home.

How It Works

When a delivery person seeks entry to an apartment, a resident is given an option to leave the parcel at the gate. If the option is selected, the guard must click a picture of the package and have it dropped off at a secure spot. At the same time, a 6-digit pass code is given to the resident. The resident can later simply share the 6-digit code for secure collection of the parcel.