Ten minutes to your door, no minutes to clean

Tukaram Mundhe, Maharashtra's food-safety chief, has gone viral this month for shutting famous restaurants and even noticing Shah Rukh Khan over an ad . Earlier this month his inspectors inspected around a dozen dark-store belonging to Blinkit, Zepto and Instamart. He isn't alone. On 22 August, a separate regulator in Telangana raided the dark stores behind grocery apps in Hyderabad, shutting four on the spot for expired stock and pests.

Everyone's cheering the crackdown. But it can't fix what it found. To deliver in ten minutes, a dark store packs a supermarket's worth of stock into a residential space, moving so fast that the work of keeping food safe keeps losing out. That's what the model produces when it runs as designed.

Quick commerce in India now runs on nearly 10 million orders a day. So why is there still no rule for the space your food waits in?

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