Community Guidelines

1. Why these exist

Most marketplaces connect strangers who will never meet. Saanjha connects neighbours — people who live on the same street, use the same lift, and will see each other again tomorrow.

That changes what good behaviour means. A bad transaction here is not an anonymous refund request; it is an argument at someone's gate. These guidelines exist so that the trust a neighbourhood already has is not spent carelessly on a platform.

They apply to everyone on Saanjha: members, sellers, service providers, delivery partners and community admins. Where a rule applies only to one of those, it says so.

2. The one rule

Behave like the neighbour you actually are.

Almost everything below follows from that. If you are unsure whether something is acceptable, the useful question is not "does a rule forbid this?" but "would I be comfortable if the person on the other side lived two floors below me?" — because they probably do.

3. Your account

• One person, one account. Saanjha identity is tied to a verified mobile number. Do not create additional accounts to evade a restriction, inflate a rating, or claim a welcome offer twice.
• Be who you say you are. Use your real name and a recognisable photo. Neighbours use both to know who is handing over goods at a pickup.
• Do not impersonate another resident, a shop, a service provider, a community admin, or Saanjha itself.
• Do not sell, rent or share your account. If someone else shops for your household, add them to your household in the app rather than handing over your login.
• You are responsible for what happens under your account, including anything done by someone you gave access to.

4. Joining a community

• Join where you actually live, work or shop. Claiming a flat number that is not yours to get into a community is the single most damaging thing you can do here, because every other protection assumes membership is real.
• A community is not a mailing list. Do not join one purely to advertise into it.
• Invite honestly. Invite links and QR codes are for bringing in real neighbours, not for inflating a community to reach a threshold faster.
• A community can set its own rules — its admins may require approval to join, restrict membership to residents, or keep the community unlisted. Respect the ones your community sets, in addition to these.

5. Your neighbours' privacy

This is where a neighbourhood platform can do real harm, so it is stated separately.

• Do not share what you see inside a community outside it. Member names, flat numbers, phone numbers, order contents, photographs and chat messages stay in the community they were shared in.
• Do not screenshot and circulate a member's messages, address or order history — including to a residents' WhatsApp group.
• Do not compile a list of who lives where from what you can see on Saanjha.
• Do not photograph people at a pickup or handover without asking.
• A community preview shows rules, admins and activity — never the member list or the chat. That is deliberate. Do not try to work around it, and do not pass on what you can see once you are inside.

Saanjha itself is built to the same rule: contact matching uses one-way hashes and never uploads your contact book, and community analytics are suppressed below five households precisely so that an aggregate cannot become a name.

6. How we treat each other

Not permitted, anywhere on Saanjha — in listings, chats, reviews, announcements or a provider profile:

• Harassment, threats, intimidation, or repeated unwanted contact after someone has asked you to stop.
• Discrimination or exclusion on the basis of caste, religion, region, language, gender, sexual orientation, disability, marital status, or diet. Refusing to serve, sell to, or admit a neighbour on any of these grounds is a serious violation, and so is a listing that signals such a preference.
• Hate speech, slurs, or content that demeans a group.
• Sexual content, or unwanted sexual attention of any kind.
• Doxxing, or threatening to expose someone's personal details.
• Content involving children beyond what a parent has chosen to share about their own household.
• Misinformation presented as fact where it can cause harm — particularly about food safety, medicines or health.

Disagreements about an order are normal. Handle them through the dispute process in §10, not by escalating in a community feed.

7. Buying and selling honestly

If you sell on Saanjha:

• List what you actually have. Stock and availability should be real at the time you publish them, and updated when they change.
• Price honestly. The price a member sees is the price they pay. Do not advertise a price you do not intend to honour, and do not quote a low price and add unexplained charges at handover.
• Honour what you commit to. Winning a requirement or accepting an order and then not fulfilling it is the behaviour that kills a neighbourhood marketplace fastest.
• Do not bid falsely. Quoting a price you cannot deliver in order to win volume — and then under-delivering, substituting or renegotiating — carries penalties, suspension of seller privileges, and an effect on your rating.
• Do not manipulate ratings — no reviews from your own accounts, no reviews traded with another seller, no pressuring a member to change or withdraw one.
• Describe verification accurately. A Saanjha Verified Business badge says you have passed real checks. It is not a quality guarantee, and presenting it as one misleads your neighbours.
• Sell only what you are permitted to. Food requires FSSAI registration where it applies, with allergens declared as structured data rather than buried in prose. Medicines, rides and anything else with a licensing regime require that licence, held by you.

If you buy on Saanjha:

• Order in good faith. Placing orders you do not intend to collect, particularly on a community trip, costs a real neighbour real money.
• Be there for the handover you agreed to, or tell the other person as early as you can.
• Report problems honestly. Claiming an item was missing or damaged when it was not is fraud against a neighbour, not against a faceless company. Evidence in disputes is weighted on both sides, and repeated unfounded claims are tracked.
• Do not use a report as leverage to get a discount, or because you found a cheaper option elsewhere.

8. Community buying trips

A trip is one member spending their own morning, and often their own money, on behalf of everyone else. It deserves particular care.

• The cutoff is real. It exists because the buyer has to leave. Orders placed after it cannot be carried.
• If you host a trip, do what you said — the destination, the timing, and the items you announced. If you cannot, cancel early rather than late.
• Aborting a trip for a genuine reason carries no penalty. A closed store, a vehicle breakdown, a medical or family emergency — these are treated as what they are. Abandoning a trip without cause, repeatedly, will suspend your ability to host one.
• Distribute fairly. Everyone who joined gets what they ordered, at the share of cost they agreed to. If the market had less than the list asked for, say so and allocate openly rather than quietly.
• Account honestly for money. Show what was actually spent. A trip host may earn a margin or service benefit where Saanjha's policies allow it — that is legitimate, and it should be visible rather than hidden inside the price.

9. Local services

A service provider is often entering someone's home. Both sides carry obligations.

Providers:

• Hold the verification your category requires. Some categories are stricter than others and are not negotiable: child-safety checks for tuition and anything involving children, licensing for mobility, FSSAI for food, and gated checks for health and spa services.
• Publish availability you can actually serve, and keep appointments you have accepted.
• Quote before you work, and revise in writing. If a job turns out to need materials or more time, record the revised quote before continuing — never present it as a surprise at the end.
• Respect the home you are in. Do not photograph it, do not bring anyone who is not part of the job, and do not contact the household afterwards for anything other than that job.
• Astrology, vastu and similar services must be offered with their disclaimer intact and never presented as a determination of fact. Muhurat timings come from a licensed source; Saanjha does not compute them and neither should a listing imply we do.

Members booking a service:

• Be present, or arrange for someone who can be. A provider who travels to a locked door has lost their slot and their fare.
• Agree scope before work starts, and pay what was agreed.
• Treat a provider as a professional in your home, not as staff.

10. Money, and settling disagreements

• Pay through the agreed method. Payments go directly to the seller's own UPI ID, or by cash where a store's own delivery staff accepts it. External Saanjha delivery partners do not collect cash.
• Do not move a transaction off Saanjha to avoid fees. The protections — the record of what was agreed, the dispute process, the verification, the recourse — exist because the transaction happened here. Off-platform, none of them apply, and neither side can be helped afterwards.
• Raise a dispute through the app, not through a public post in the community feed. A dispute has a defined process, and evidence from both sides is weighed.
• Community admins have no financial authority. No admin can issue a refund, alter a settlement, or see another member's payment details. Anyone claiming otherwise is not acting for Saanjha — report them.

11. Announcements, offers and spam

Attention in a small community is finite, and abusing it is the fastest way to make people mute a channel they need.

• Operational messages — a trip, a cutoff, a pickup, an interruption to an order — can be sent whenever they are genuinely operational, and may push a notification.
• Promotional messages are rate-limited and feed-only unless a member has explicitly opted in to hear from that seller. Do not dress a promotion up as an operational notice to get a push notification.
• Quiet hours are 22:00–07:00 IST. Only pickup-critical and security messages go out in that window.
• Opting out must be honoured. If someone opts out of your offers, do not reach them another way.
• Do not manufacture urgency. A countdown must reflect a real cutoff, and scarcity must be real. This applies to Saanjha too — it is in our own brand guidelines, and we hold sellers to the standard we set ourselves.
• Chat is never a marketing channel. Message content is not used for targeting by us, and must not be used for unsolicited selling by you.

If your announcements are muted or reported often enough, promotional rights are suspended automatically for a period. That suspension is appealable.

12. Community admins

Running a community is a position of trust, not a rank.

• Approve and remove members fairly, on the community's stated rules — never on caste, religion, language, diet, or a personal dispute.
• You have no financial authority, and no visibility into another member's payment details. Do not claim otherwise.
• Do not use the announcement channel for personal or commercial promotion.
• Do not remove a member to settle an argument you are personally party to.
• If you step away, hand over ownership. A community left without an admin is stranded — Saanjha will run a member election and archive it if nobody claims it.

13. Reporting something

If you see any of this, report it — in the app on the listing, message, profile or order concerned, or by writing to support@saanjha.ai.

If someone is in immediate danger, contact the emergency services first. Saanjha is not an emergency service and cannot respond at that speed.

Reports are treated as confidential. We do not tell the person you reported who reported them.

14. What happens when these are broken

Enforcement is graduated, and the response is matched to what actually happened rather than to who complained loudest.

Four commitments about how we apply this:

• We will tell you which rule you broke. An automated restriction always names the rule that triggered it.
• We will not take away your household's groceries over a seller-side dispute. Your ability to buy for your home is not suspended because of something that happened on the selling side of your account. A member is one person, and losing access to food over a commercial dispute is disproportionate.
• A report is not a verdict. Allegations are easy to make and a motivated person can weaponise them, so we weigh evidence from both sides, look for corroborating signals before restricting anyone, and track patterns in who is reporting as closely as patterns in who is reported.
• Serious action is reviewed by a person, not left to a rule alone.

15. Appeals

Every restriction can be appealed, and an appeal is read by someone who did not make the original decision.

Appeal in the app, or write to support@saanjha.ai. If you are not satisfied with the outcome, escalate to our Grievance Officer, Nikhil Sharma — sharmanikhil7011@gmail.com, +91 70113 93525. Complaints are acknowledged within 48 hours and resolved within 30 days. The full process is at Grievance Redressal.

16. Changes to these guidelines

We will update these as the platform grows into new categories, and we will say what changed rather than silently republishing. Where a change materially affects what is expected of you, we will tell you in the app before it takes effect.

These guidelines sit alongside the Terms of Use, which is the binding agreement between you and EVANIK NETWORKS PRIVATE LIMITED. Where the two differ, the Terms of Use governs.