Huge financial losses to start-ups in Bengaluru

Bengaluru: The ongoing river water dispute in Bengaluru has badly affected the business of start-ups and traditional companies in the State because of cancellation of orders and loss of orders due to the strike and riots since last Friday.

Toyota Kirloskar Motor, Automaker also had to face the brunt of the riots and its factory was completely shut on Tuesday as the violence in the area escalated and the impact was direct on the workers operations from Monday early hours.

Vice Chairman of Toyota, Vishwanathan told that they work on a just time model and considering that no supply could their factory on Tuesday and there is a chance that they will not be able o work tomorrow also and operations will remain shut.

Bigbasket which is  online grocery firm also faced losses because of strike and riots as they were not able to deliver the products to the customers and had suffered a loss of Rs 4 crores in two days and on Monday it was forced to completely shut its operations. Now they have a huge backlog of orders that is around 20,000 which they still need to deliver to the consumers and it will take three to four days for them to clear this backlog of orders.

In their business fruits and vegetables which are packed will be spoilt because they are perishable items and they could not even ship their products from its collection centers in Bengaluru – Mysuru road, now they will have to call back the customers and fix fresh orders with new time slots for delivery. Meanwhile their second customer service is fully functional and currently working at full strength with employees doing overtime.

There is one more online food portal called Fresh Menu known for providing freshly prepared food in their own kitchens which are centralized and it was also not able to deliver its food items to the consumer due to riots and strike in the area since Monday evening. On Tuesday morning they were not sure that all delivery boys would be coming to their office and whether they could deliver the food or not so they had to cancel thousands of orders causing huge loss of business to them.

Bengaluru is the silicon valley of India and this is the first time that violence in the state has dented its image.

Even Flipkart which originates in Bengaluru was greatly impacted from these fresh riots in the state. However the situation is not so bad in the other parts of the state and looks normal but the company officials are still worried about the safety of the delivery boys and they hope that the situation will soon get better and will return to normal operations. Meanwhile they are trying to mitigate all customer impact by keeping them informed about the delays caused due the strike and riot situation.