New Delhi, Oct 7 (IANS): From Gujarat's Himmatnagar to Assam's Jorhat, food delivery platform Swiggy has expanded its services to 500 cities in India, matching rival Zomato's reach in the country.

Unveiling its plan on Monday, Swiggy, which has added 60,000 new restaurants in the past six months, said it would expand to 600 cities by December 2019.

"With presence in 500 cities and 75 universities, Swiggy already has the widest reach in the country. We will further expand this to 600 cities and 200 universities by December 2019," Swiggy's Chief Operating Officer Vivek Sunder said in a statement.

"Swiggy's vision is to elevate the quality of life of consumers by offering unparalleled convenience. As we work towards enabling this for a billion Indians, expanding to tier-3 and tier-4 cities is a critical step," Sunder said.

Swiggy has progressed from launching in one city every two months in early 2018 to launching in four cities a day in the month of September.

With this expansion, over 350 million or one in four Indians can now access the food delivery platform in the country, Swiggy said.

Since April 2019, Swiggy has increased the number of restaurant partners by almost 1.8 times to 1.4 lakh restaurants currently.

In tier-3 and tier-4 cities specifically, Swiggy has onboarded over 15,000 restaurants in the last six months.

"Our growing fleet of over 2.1 lakh active delivery partners have more income opportunities due to the scale and offerings of Swiggy," Sunder said.

In addition to expanding to smaller towns, Swiggy also announced that it has expanded its service to over 75 universities including IIT Roorkee, NIT Kurukshetra, IIT Kharagpu, NIT Calicut, BITS Pilani and Lovely Professional University among others.