Earlier this year, when Indrajeet Ghorpade visited a restaurant in Hyderabad for a date, he was denied entry by the staff, who told him that their policy did not allow gay couples, but only a “girl-boy couple”. When he went to a nearby police station to report the issue, he was told that no action could be taken as it was a private business.

“I reached out to my queer friends and learnt that many of them had experiences similar kinds of humiliating incidents across various cities in India,” Ghorpade later wrote in a Facebook post.

In April, Ghorpade started an online petition to ask restaurant discovery and delivery platform to influence restaurants to open their doors to all guests, discontinue their partnership with those that banned the LGBTQ community, and add an LGBTQ-friendly label for easy filtering. The petition received over 10,000 signatures in just over a month.

A month later in May, Zomato announced that it was introducing a new LGBTQIA-friendly tag on their app for individual restaurant pages in Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad and Pune. It also said it would “engage with restaurateurs to help sensitise them to how some current and potential customers feel about their practices and also educated them about the significant of having an “LGBTQIA Friendly” tag on their Zomato page”. Read more via Times of India