Hardly a day goes by without a newspaper landing at our doorsteps before we even wake up. Journalists, editors, and printing press staff deserve credit for giving us our daily dose of news, but not all of the credit. Their job ends as newspapers are printed. That’s when distribution begins, thanks to a different set of people. In the Indian capital of Delhi alone, more than 3 million newspapers are distributed to homes every morning within hours of their printing.
The consistency and the punctuality of Delhi’s roughly 20,000 delivery people are often compared to the functioning of Six Sigma companies. Yet they remain underpaid and are part of the “unorganized sector.”
To witness and document their contribution to the dissemination of news, a group of photo enthusiasts at the Delhi Photo Expedition got up before dawn one day – something that thousands of deliverymen do every morning – and headed to a newspaper distribution hub in the ITO area of New Delhi.