CHITRAL: Instead of wandering in search of white-collar job, three educated young men launched for the first time a home-delivery service in Chitral city to provide the customers at their doorsteps with any article they wanted to buy from the bazaar.

The three men — an electrical engineer Khalid Mahmood; Shafiq Azam having MPhil degree in bio-tech; and Raeezada Noor Zaman having MS degree in political science, have started delivery of daily use items from the market in response of telephone calls of their customers. They deliver the items at the homes or offices of their customers instantly.

The home delivery service has gained popularity in the city during the last one week after its launching as it has saved people from going to the market for purchasing different items.

Sahib Jan, a resident of Balach village, told Dawn that the stock of tablets prescribed by the doctor exhausted in his home and he had to take it on Wednesday morning but there was no one to fetch it from the bazaar as he was on bed rest when someone told him about the service.

“I sent the copy of my dossier to the service office through the WhatsApp and hardly 20 minutes had passed when the bell of my home started ringing and a smart motorcyclist was standing there with the packet of medicine,” he said.

Mr Jan said that he would have spent more than Rs600 to go to the bazaar in a taxicab but he paid only Rs100 for it and it was a pleasant experience for him.

Eng Khalid, when contacted by telephone, told this scribe that the service gained popularity far more than their expectations and it was pleasurable for them.

He said that they wanted to give the youth of Chitral a message by launching the service that instead of a job in a public or private office, it was better to have one’s own business. “The initiative of self-employment can do away with unemployment in the area,” he added.

Published in Dawn, January 19th, 2018