Zomato reinstates employee who caused a national uproar on Twitter

Zomato’s CEO Deepinder Goyal has announced on that the company has chosen to reinstate their
employee whose comments have been doing the rounds on internet for calling a
customer from Tamil Nadu a ‘liar’ and asking him to ‘learn Hindi’. The employee
went on to say that everyone should know ‘Hindi’ since it is our (India’s) national
language, which is a false narrative.

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India does
not have a national language. However, the country does have 22 official languages.

Deepinder
has urged the people in the country to have a higher level of ‘tolerance’ and ‘chill’
since an ignorant mistake by a
person managed to turn into a national issue. He tweeted, “An ignorant mistake by someone in a support centre of a food
delivery company became a national issue. The level of tolerance and chill in
our country needs to be way higher than it is nowadays. Who’s to be blamed here?”

He believes that a single instance
should not cost the employee their livelihood, especially considering the fact
that this is something she can be taught about.

Goyal added, “On that note, we are
reinstating the agent – this alone is not something she should have been
fired for. This is easily something she can learn and do better about going
forward.”

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The CEO
stressed that the people working at the company’s call centre are young and on the
learning curve of their careers so they are bound to make some mistakes along
the way. They should not be expected to be experts on languages or religious
sentiments.

“And remember, our call centre agents are young
people, who are at the start of their learning curves and careers. They are not
experts on languages and regional sentiments. Nor am I, btw.,” he added.

In his final tweet
Deepinder wrote, “Having said that, we should all tolerate each other’s
imperfections. And appreciate each other’s language and regional sentiments.
Tamil Nadu – we love you. Just as much as we love the rest of the country. Not
more, not less. We are all the same, as much as we are different.”

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Following
the incident which was the reason behind “Reject_Zomato” trending on Twitter,
the company has announced that it is working on a Tamil version of the app as
well as a setting up of a local Tamil call support centre in Coimbatore.