This Swiggy rider wrote his own story, and is earning lakhs from his side hustle  

There was a time when Ajit Kumar‘s day started before sunrise and ended long after most people had switched off their lights. He rode his bicycle across Faridabad, sometimes covering nearly 100 kilometres, to deliver about 20 food orders for Swiggy. His shifts stretched to 16 hours. It was hard, unglamorous work, and he did it because his family needed him to. 

Ajit had once been a medical student, chasing a future that felt within reach. Then the pandemic lockdown arrived and took the ground from under his family’s finances. College had to wait. Delivery work became the only option that paid quickly enough to matter. 

The setback that followed could have ended the story altogether. A road accident left Ajit with multiple fractures, confined to bed at a time when his family’s loans, taken for his sister’s wedding, were coming due. Unable to cycle, unable to work in the way he knew, he began looking for anything he could do from where he lay. That search led him to a writer’s opening at Pocket FM, the audio storytelling platform. 

He had no formal training in writing fiction. What he had was time, urgency, and a story he understood better than anyone: his own. From his bed, Ajit began writing episodes, some days turning out four or five at a stretch. Three months in, one of his stories topped a Pocket FM contest. The prize was Rs 20,000, and he handed every rupee to his mother. 

That single win changed the trajectory of everything that followed. A payout of Rs 52,000 came next, then Rs 6.29 lakh. Today, Ajit is the lead writer on ‘Brahmyodha: The Destroyer’, an audio series whose central character, Vidyut, is an orphan searching for the stability of a father, a narrative that mirrors Ajit’s own hunt for financial security. The show has crossed 16.8 crore total plays across more than 1,300 episodes, and its audience quadrupled through 2026, putting it on course to cross Rs 100 crore in platform revenue. Ajit himself now earns Rs 11 lakh a month and has been described as a crorepati, a title that would have seemed unthinkable from the seat of a delivery bicycle. 

His story reached a wider audience only after investor Rahul Mathur shared it online, prompting the kind of reaction that turns a personal journey into a public one. Ajit has since spoken at the Jaipur Literature Festival, a stage that could not be further from the delivery routes he once mapped by memory. 

What makes Ajit’s story land is not simply the scale of the money, though Rs 11 lakh a month is not a small number by any measure. It is the sequence of events behind it: a college dropout, a punishing gig economy job, an accident that could have been the end, and a decision to write instead of wait. It is a reminder that the platform economy, often criticised for underpaying the people who power it, can also become a genuine route upward for someone willing to put in the hours, wherever those hours are spent. 

Ajit Kumar’s world changed, in his own words, because he refused to let one setback be the final chapter. For every delivery rider cycling through the heat with an order bag on their back, his rise is a quiet argument that the next opportunity can come from the most unlikely direction, so long as someone is ready to notice it and act.