BENGALURU: Twenty-year-old Saraswati Oad is used to walking into other people’s homes and being told which chore she needs to take up first. Be it a sink full of utensils, a dusty floor, or unwashed laundry piled up in the bathroom.Oad is an ‘expert’ with Snabbit, the company’s term for workers whom customers can book through its app for short stints of sweeping, mopping, dishwashing and other household chores on demand.Unlike a regular domestic help hired by the month, she moves from one app-assigned home to another.But every so often, she finds another domestic worker already inside.“There was a lot of work in the house. That is why they made another booking,” Oad told TOI in Hindi, recalling one such assignment.It’s not that the family’s regular help had not turned up. She simply could not finish everything alone.Oad took up the utensils, sweeping and mopping. The other woman carried on with the rest.“Sometimes we work together. In some homes, we do separate work,” she said. “It helps her.”Snabbit, Urban Company’s InstaHelp and Pronto belong to a new crop of on-demand house-help services.Their apps allow urban households to summon a worker for a short cleaning job. The services were largely built for familiar household emergencies, for when the domestic help did not turn up, or guests were arriving.Increasingly, however, they are also being used to support a regular domestic worker who needs reinforcements.“Sometimes, the help needs help,” is how Snabbit founder and CEO Aayush Agarwal described it.He added the company noticed this curious pattern while examining bookings from luxury residential complexes, including The Camellias in Gurugram.“This behaviour appears more frequently in larger households and premium residential neighbourhoods, particularly where live-in domestic workers occasionally require additional support,” Agarwal said.“While we do not have directional numbers to share at this stage, the use case is becoming increasingly visible.”The second worker may be called for dusting, laundry, ironing, guest preparations or to handle the overflow on a heavy day.Usually, the regular domestic help asks the employer to make the booking and the household pays. In some affluent homes, staff members are given budgets to run the house, and they use part of that money to bring in on-demand help.At other times, a worker may be unwell, dealing with menstrual discomfort or simply need to leave early for a personal engagement.Oad said the regular workers she meets are often curious about the app and her earnings.“They ask me about the salary,” she said. “Many do not get as much as we can earn, so they are curious.”Urban Company said it has seen similar instances on InstaHelp.“We’ve observed anecdotal instances where customers use InstaHelp to supplement their existing household support during periods of high workload,” a spokesperson said.“This could include occasions when a regular domestic worker recommends booking additional help for a specific task or a busy day.”Pronto said the behaviour exists on its platform but remains one-off. “We see it a handful of times a month, against about one million orders a month on the platform,” a spokesperson said.The company said such requests tend to arise after repeated visits have built familiarity between a worker and a customer.The arrangement itself is not entirely new. Domestic workers often send a friend or relative as a substitute when they take long breaks.The apps are now formalising that offline arrangement. The regular help can ask for assistance.The employer places the order, pays and knows exactly who is coming.The regular worker, on their part, isn’t worried that the substitute will take away their job.
