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Why this startup won't give maids to Bollywood stars
NEW DELHI: Tinsel town's ugly underbelly is showing. A Mumbai-based start-up called bookmybai.com, an online platform through which people can hire domestic staff, has learned this the hard way. Barely two years in the business, it has announced that it will stop providing domestic help to Bollywood celebrities after cases of physical and verbal abuse, withholding payments and bad behaviour started mounting up.
Founder Anupam Sinhal, who announced the ban through a blog post, alleged that he has over 25 cases where a Bollywood or TV personality has misbehaved with their maids.
Sample this: one celebrity refused to let her male helper attend the last rites of his dead mother till the agency gave her a replacement. Another gave her maid only tea and bread as food, forcing the agency to find as many as seven replacements in less than six months. Yet another beat up her maid almost daily.
Sinhal described his experience working with Bollywood celebrities, some of them national film awardees, as nothing less than "horrendous''.
"I felt that they are misusing their position to take advantage of people working for them who are helpless and poor. I wanted to bring out a true picture that these people who are role models for us, who we look up, to don't have basic ethics to treat human beings,'' he told TOI.
In one case, he wrote, physical abuse of the maid was almost a daily affair. "As soon as we got to know, we asked the maid to leave as soon as possible. When she came to our office, we could see marks of physical abuse on her body.''
However, the company that currently has 50,000 domestic workers on its rolls has been unable to pursue cases of abuse with the police as the maids do not want to file a FIR. "I am willing to file cases and take legal action but the maids feared harassment by the police,'' he said.
Sinhal claims he has also been threatened with bouncers, defamation on social media, police cases and legal notices forcing him to refund the deposit and close the case on some occasions to avoid trouble. "We have a very strict abuse clause in our contract and the employer is not given a replacement if there is any form of abuse. The celebrity called us and told us that she has 4 lakh followers on twitter and she would post bad tweets about the company if we don't give her a replacement,'' he recounted.
toi.in/I2m0La via @TOIBusiness
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