40% restaurants may not reopen at all in India: Zomato

-3 months.

"Predictably, residential areas are doing 50 per cent better than commercial areas. Restaurants in and around commercial districts are expected to take the longest to recover," Zomato said.

The leading food delivery platform said it has delivered seven crore food orders since the lockdown started on March 25.

"We estimate that between other food aggregators and direct restaurant channels, Ind have ordered 20 crore times since the lockdown," the report mentioned.

The number of restaurants offering food delivery is at 70 per cent of the pre-COVID levels. Out of this, about five per cent restaurants did not offer food delivery services pre-Covid.

With companies giving employees the option to work from home, there has been a mass exodus of people from metros to other cities across India.

"One in every five Zomato customers in metros (pre-Covid) have opened their app from a smaller town recently. Out of these relocated folks, one third have already started ordering food again from their new location," the Zomato report noted.

( With inputs from IANS )