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The Amazing story of Mumbai Dabbawalas..!!

By : Shailena Varma, Logistics Manager, Target
Industry : Retail Chain/Logistics Functional Area : Business Processes Keywords :

amazing story mumbai dabbawalas

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Four thousand five hundred semi-literate dabbawalas collect and deliver 175,000 packages within hours. What should we learn from this unique, simple and highly efficient 120-year-old logistics system? The Dabbawalas who provide a lunch delivery service in Mumbai have been in the business for over 100 years. In 1998, Forbes Global magazine conducted an analysis and gave them a Six Sigma rating of efficiency. The system the dabbawalas have developed over the years revolves around strong teamwork and strict timemanagement. At 9am every morning, home-made meals are picked up in special boxes, which are loaded onto trolleys and pushed to a railway station. They then make their way by train to an unloading station. The boxes are rearranged so that those going to similar destinations, indicated by a system of coloured lettering, end up on the same trolley. The meals are then delivered99.9999% of the time, to the right address.

Harvard Business School has produced a case study of the dabbawalas, urging its students to learn from the organisation, which relies entirely on human endeavour and employs no technology.

"A model of managerial and organizational simplicity" says Ck Prahlad for the dabbawalas
Six sigma performance Every day, battling the traffic and crowds of Mumbai city, the Dabbawalas , also known as Tiffin wallahs, unfailingly delivered thousands of dabbas to hungry people and later returned the empty dabbas to where they came from. The Dabbawalas delivered either home-cooked meals from clients' homes or lunches ordered for a monthly fee, from women who cook at their homes according to the clients' specifications. The Dabbawalas' service was used by both working people and school children.

In 1998, Forbes Global magazine, conducted a quality assurance study on the Dabbawalas' operations and gave it a Six Sigma efficiency rating of 99.999999; the Dabbawalas made one error in six million transactions. In 1998, two Dutch filmmakers, Jascha De Wilde and Chris Relleke made a documentary called 'Dabbawallahs, Mumbai's unique lunch service'. In July 2001, The Christian Science Monitor, an international newspaper published from Boston, Mass., USA, covered the Dabbawalas in an article called 'Fastest Food: It's Big Mac vs. Bombay's dabbawallahs'. In 2002, Jonathan Harley, a reporter, did a story on the Dabbawalas with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). In 2003, BBC also aired a program on the Dabbawalas, which was part of a series on unique businesses of the world. In 2003, Paul S. Goodman and Denise Rousseau, both faculty at the Graduate School of Industrial Administration of Carnegie Mellon University, made their first full-length documentary called 'The Dabbawallas'. Instead of asking how knowledge in developing countries can help less developed countries, this film focuses on how developed countries can learn from less developed countries". Back home, the Dabbawalas were invited to speak at Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) meets and at leading Indian business schools such as IIM, Bangalore and Lucknow.

The organisation structure and the working style.. The Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers' Charity Trust had a very flat structure with only three levels, the Governing Council, the Mukadams and the Dabbawalas . From the Governing Council, a President and a Secretary were elected. The Governing Council held meetings once a month which were attended by the Mukadams and Dabbawalas. At these meetings, the Dabbawalas discussed their problems and explored possible solutions. The problems could be with the police, municipal corporation, customers, etc. They also adjudicated disputes among Dabbawalas using their own system. The Trust collected Rs.15 from each Dabbawala every month to maintain a welfare fund... Here is a video of "A day in the life of Mumbai Dabbawalas." .This will give you a clear picture about their efforts and their working style. Uninterrupted services Would you expect your tiffin man to deliver tiffin to you on a heavy monsoon day? The answer would be No. Except for people using the dabbawalas service. Because they have a record of uninterrupted even on the days of severe weather such as Mumbai's characteristic monsoons. The local dabbawalas at the receiving and the sending ends are known to the customers personally, so that there is no question of lack of trust. Team work The entire system depends on teamwork and meticulous timing. Tiffins are collected from homes between 7.00 am and 9.00 am, and taken to the nearest railway station. At various intermediary stations, they are hauled onto platforms and sorted out for area-wise distribution, so that a single tiffin could change hands three to four times in the course of its daily journey.

At Mumbai's downtown stations, the last link in the chain, a final relay of dabbawalas fan out to the tiffins' destined bellies. Lunch hour over, the whole process moves into reverse and the tiffins return to suburban homes by 6.00 pm. Elegant logistics In the dabbawalas' elegant logistics system, using 25 kms of public transport, 10 km of footwork and involving multiple transfer points, mistakes rarely happen. According to a Forbes 1998 article, one mistake for every eight million deliveries is the norm. How do they achieve virtual six-sigma quality with zero documentation? For one, the system limits the routing and sorting to a few central points. Secondly, a simple color code determines not only packet routing but packet prioritising as lunches transfer from train to bicycle to foot. So friends what all can you learn from them? Aren't they great..!!! In this high technologically advanced time these people are working absolutely without it. They have an excellent supply chain, they dont even know what it means. Most of the people working with them are semiliterate but still they read the tiffin code correctly and deliver it Their attitude of competitive collaboration is equally unusual, particularly in India. The operation process is competitive at the customers' end but united at the delivery end, ensuring their survival since a century and more. Is their business model worth replicating in the digital age is the big question. There are many more things to learn from them...What do you say? Top Comment : Makrand Bhave | 2 years ago

Absolutely. Its a case study at Harvard Univ and probably many more in Europe as well!! go to top

4 comments on "The Amazing story of Mumbai Dabbawalas..!!"

Sort by: Most Recent Top Rated Commented by drpatnaik, Head-BD, Ramky Report Abuse
Not Rated

| 9 months ago

It has something to do with supply chain management and one has to learn from this.
Commented by Sri Sri, consultant, NOYB Inc Report Abuse
Not Rated

| 11 months ago

The reason for their success is that they dont have "Managers" and everyone " Delivers".
Commented by Sudeep Tarafdar, Senior Consultant, IBM Report Abuse
Not Rated

| 2 years ago

Because of their great history from the times of British rule, thats why even Prince Charles came to see them, he made his visit just to see the Dabbawala' s and nobody else, by which you can imagine their way of work, culture and th eir vast history...
Commented by Makrand Bhave, Sales Promotion Manager, XYZ Report Abuse Rating : +1 | 2 years ago

Absolutely. e as well!!

Its a case study at Harvard Univ and probably many more in Europ

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What Harvard is learning from the Mumbai dabbawalas

Tags: Harvard Business School | Mumbai dabbawalas

Written by Emily Tan Monday, 03 January 2011 00:00

Most of their workers are illiterate and the last major upgrade the 125 year-old organisation made to its delivery chain was the bicycle. Yet the Mumbai dabbawalas deliver and return 130,000 dabbas, or tiffin every day. According to Forbes magazine, they have a Six Sigma rating of 99.999999, which means less than one out of every six million deliveries goes amiss.

Since the publication of the article in Forbes in 1998, the dabbawalas have been the darlings of the international media scene. They have been visited by Prince Charles and Richard Branson, who worked as a dabbawala for a day. They have also been studied by management schools around the world, all kee to learn just how they do it. A cooperative of 5,000 members, the dabbawalas of Mumbai collect the filled dabbas from homes all across Mumbai and deliver them to the requisite offices by lunchtime, which is 12.30pm, traversing the length of Mumbai via the train system. At 2pm they retrieve the now-empty dabbas and return them to their originating households, completing an estimated 260,000 transactions in a city of 10.5 million people, accurately and on time.

Dabbawalas view their work as worship

It all started because in 1885, a banker in Mumbai really loved his wife, says founder and chairman of the Dabbawala Foundation, Manish Tripathi, in an interview in October. This banker had to work far from home and so could not return home to eat the lunch prepared by his wife. He decided instead to hire a man to pick up the packed lunch from his home and have it delivered to his office. Others started imitating him. Then one day, Mahadev Haji Bache, a farmer from Pune, saw an opportunity and created a delivery business that is how the dabbawalas started.

College-educated Manish had heard of the dabbawalas, following the excitement of Prince Charless vis in 2003. He saw that the semi-literate organisation did not understand how to use the opportunities that were coming their way.

I saw I could make a big difference to the organisation. I first joined as a dabbawala, but now because I can make more money for the organisation, I spend most of my time travelling and speaking, said Manish, who was in Kuala Lumpur three months ago to speak on Inspiring Innovators, a talk organise by the local office of international express delivery company TNT Express Worldwide (M) Sdn Bhd and ADOI magazine. The lecture circuit has also taken Manish to Fortune 500 companies around the globe, as well as to Wharton and Stanford. He is still bemused by the interest shown by the MBAs, as he calls them. Most of our members cannot read! Yet were constantly studied by the MBAs. Truth is, our members are suitably educated for their profession. We couldnt employ MBAs; theyd ask too many questions, he laughs. Academic interest in the dabbawalas continues unabated. Earlier last year, Harvard Business School introduced its case study titled The Dabbawala System: On-Time Delivery, Every Time as part of its MBA curriculum.

It is very different from the organisations that our students study every day. It challenges their assumptions about the drivers of performance. It also inspires. The Dabbawala system works because of its people, not because of technology or sophisticated management, says Stefan Thomke, co-author of the case study and William Barclay Harding Professor of Business Administration at Harvard, in an email interview in December.

Thomkes interest in the Dabbawalas started two years ago while he was in Mumbai working on another case study.

I found a brief mention of the Dabbawala organisation while reading in my hotel room. I got interested because of the intellectual puzzle: How can an organisation with no technology, no sophisticated logistics management system, and people with little education achieve such high-delivery performance in a fast-moving city that can be very chaotic? he says. Working with Mona Srivastava, a research associate at the HBS India Research Centre, Thomke compiled the case study over a period of six months, travelling between Boston and Mumbai. Initially, Thomke assumed that the secret was in the operating system, in the way the Dabbawalas managed material and information flows.

But it turns out that much of their success can be attributed to their human resource system the way they hire, develop, manage and reward people. Its an organisation built around people, not around technology, says Thomke. I wish that I could take all of our MBA students to Mumbai so they can see the system. Reading and discussing the case study in our classroom is the next best thing. Last time we taught the case, we had a live video conference with DWs (Boston-Mumbai) and students were able to ask questions.

Gerry Powers, managing director for TNT Malaysia, confessed that he was both humbled and inspired b Manishs talk at the TNT office in Menara PKNS. Technology is a wonderful thing but, sometimes, I do wonder if we overcomplicate things, says Powers.

TNT Worldwide itself was started by one man Ken Thomas and his truck. Today, the global compan employs over 75,000 people operating 26,000 road vehicles and 47 jet freighter aircraft across 200

countries.

We have to remember that we are basically a people business and should not let bureaucracy make us difficult to deal with in any way. If you take care of your people, they will drive the service, drive growt and benefit the customers. So if my employees are not happy, I am nothing, says Powers. Work as worship

From left: Manish has spoken to Fortune 500 companies around the globe, as well as at Wharton and Stanford. Right: Branson became a dabbawala for a day to launch Virgin Atlantic's flights to London from Mumbai in 2005.

According to Manish, the dabbawalas legendary dedication, which pushes them to dash through the streets of Mumbai laden with tiffin carriers in all manner of weather, stems from devotion. Our dabbawalas view their work as worship. They are grateful to have work, and to serve others by delivering food is to serve God, he says.

Harvards case study outlines one shining example of the commitment shown by the dabbawalas. In July 2005, unusually heavy monsoon rains, combined with record high tides, flooded Mumbai. Like their customers, many of the dabbawalas were stranded in trains, at railway stations and sidewalks for two days. Raghunath Medge, president of the Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Association (one of the Mumbai Dabbawalas two governing committees), was trapped on a train with 10 other dabbawalas returning with empty dabbas. He recalled thinking, We cant leave without the dabbas and we cant avoid the ditches and potholes while wading through the water. Nevertheless, on the second day, even before the city recovered, the dabbawalas waded through waist-high water and delivered the dabbas bac home. Everyone in Mumbai recognises the white Gandhi cap worn by our dabbawalas and they respect us for

the work we do. They also know not to stand in our way! says Manish, doffing his own. In the mornings, when the dabbawalas collect the dabbas (around 9am), if the housewife is late with the dabba for more than a week, we will stop serving them. We are not going to let thousands suffer, waiting for their lunches, because one person was late. As a result, its said that the housewives of Mumbai are more afraid of the dabbawalas than they are of their husbands!

The dabawallas dedication to their duty was observed firsthand by Prince Charles when he asked to meet with them in 2003. In response to his invitation for the dabbawalas to meet with him at his hotel, the dabbawalas replied: Dear Prince Charles, we are unable to meet with you at your hotel as we will b delivering tiffins. However, if you will come to the train station at 10am, we will be sorting the tiffins and will be able to meet you then, recites Manish. The prince did indeed meet the dabbawalas at the Western Railway Headquarters opposite Churchgate station in south Mumbai, where he received a white Gandhi cap. The universal respect they have gained enables the dabbawalas to take pride in their work despite their low income which averages INR7,000 (RM487) a month. We dont pay any salaries. Every single dabbawala is a shareholder and gets an equal share of the income, says Manish.

The Harvard case study notes that when the dabbawala organisation first started, one dabbawala would be in charge of an area and would hire 15 to 20 delivery boys. But in 1983, the dabbawalas moved to an owner-partner system based on a profit-sharing model. Each area is now run by groups of about 25 members who manage their own finances, customers and operational activities.

Each dabbawala is capable of collecting up to 20 dabbas a day but this is the maximum. Usually in a group, each dabbawala will collect less so that, if a dabbawala is sick, the others can compensate. New dabbawalas are hired only to replace a member or when there are too many new customers in an area, explains Manish. Turnover for the dabbawalas is nearly non-existent. Members, only four of whom are women, range in age from 18 to 65, with senior members moving on to supervisory roles. If a dabbawala wants to leave, he has to find someone else to take his place, says Manish. New members are recruited only from the 30 or so villages around Pune; many are relatives or friends. If someone wants to become a dabbawala, he will be on probation for six months on a salary of

INR3,000. After which, if he wants to be a member and the others accept him, he will have to invest 10 times the expected monthly income in the groups business (for example, if the groups members earn INR7,000 a month each, the new dabbawala would have to pay INR70,000), says Manish. The dabbawalas homogeneity is one of their strengths, says Manish. We are all one family, from the Vakari sect. We eat lunch together and we pray together.
Prince Charles had to fit his schedule around the dabbawalas' for his visit in 2003

Resistant to technology Until now, the dabbawalas have proven resistant to technology. While the English website, www.mydabbawala.com/index2.htm, tha Manish set up has generated inquiries and requests for lectures, new customers still cant ask to subscribe to the service.

If you want a dabbawala to come to your house, you ask a friend to tell their dabbawala, or you find a member and tell him. He will then quote a price based on where you live its more expensive if you live far from a train station, says Manish. On average, each customer pays around INR300 (RM20.60) month for the service.

So far, the dabbawala word-of-mouth system is good enough for them, he says. We dont have to spend on advertising, we have Prince Charles as our brand ambassador! he laughs, adding that the princes visit catapulted the organisation to international fame. Before him, it was just the MBAs.

If there is one weakness to the dabbawala system, it is its inability to adapt and change in a city that is evolving rapidly. The case study by Harvard noted that over the past 40 years, the number of vehicles in Mumbai had grown from 61,000 vehicles in 1950 to over 1.02 million in 2008. The worsening traffic ha made travelling by bicycle and transporting goods by handcart increasingly difficult and dangerous. The increase in traffic also resulted in more road repairs, forcing the dabbawalas to detour and running or pedalling faster to cope.

The tight schedule the dabbawalas operate on also allows for little variation. When Manish attempted to glean additional revenue by distributing fliers and samples on behalf of corporations, the extra time needed to distribute the samples threw their system out of gear, observes the case study. The organisation is also unable to expand out of Mumbai as no other city in India has as comprehensive railway system.

The Mumbai dabbawalas will always be in Mumbai, says Manish. For now, Manish is trying to connect the dabbawalas with cell phones, thus enabling customers to contact their dabbawala. Hes confident that through sponsorship, the cellphone costs can be managed. But he is encountering resistance. My biggest wish is to do more for the organisation, but the members are reluctant to cooperate. For example, a company wanted to donate a large sum to our organisation, but in the end we never received it because our members insisted on the donation being made in cash. They simply cannot understand electronic transactions, says Manish with a sigh. But in some ways they are right. Its the dabbawala himself and his commitment that matters, not the technology or qualifications.

1. Build your organisation around people Much of the dabbawala organisations success is due to their human resource system, in the way they hire, develop, manage and reward people, says Stefan Thomke, William Barclay Harding Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Its an organisation built around people, not around technology. 2. Commitment and attitude trump qualifications Although the dabbawalas are semi-literate, they are suitably educated for their jobs because they believe in serving the customer above all else. We couldnt hire MBAs, says Manish Tripathi, founder and chairman of the Dabbawala Foundation. 3. Give employees a sense of purpose and value The dedication of the dabbawalas can be partly attributed to the value they place on the work they do. Our dabbawalas view their work as worship. They are grateful to have work, and to serve others by delivering food is to serve God, says Manish. As a result, he says, everyone in Mumbai respects the dabbawalas for the work they do. 4. Stay true to your core purpose While the dabbawala organisation has received suggestions to branch out into other business lines, such as cooking the food instead of merely supplying it, it has stayed true to its century-old purpose. We focus on delivering dabbas to our customers as best as we can, says Manish. 5. Recruit carefully New dabbawalas go through a strict six-month probationary period and are hired from only the villages around Pune, so they suit the working culture. We are all one family, from the Vakari sect. We eat lunch together and we pray together, says Manish.

6. Dont be too lean, build in buffers Each dabbawala is capable of collecting up to 20 dabbas a day but this is the maximum. Usually, in a group, each dabbawala will collect less so that if a dabbawala is sick the others can compensate. New dabbawalas are hired only to replace a member or when there are too many new customers in an area, says Manish. 7. Encourage self-discipline The dabbawalas are self-motivated to be disciplined, not because they have a superior telling them what to do, says Manish. They work right because its the right thing to do. Self-discipline is the way to make an organisation great. 8. Create a sense of ownership The dabbawala organisation has no employees because every member is a shareholder, says Manish. So if one member does less work and earns less money, hes also hurting himself. 9. Maintain a flat organisation Harvard Business Schools case study notes that the dabbawala organisation has evolved into a flat organisational structure to enable quick decision-making. 10. Abandon bad customers One customer should not cause thousands to suffer. If a Mumbai housewife is late with the dabba for more than one week, we no longer serve that customer, says Manish.

The questions most frequently asked of the dabbawalas start with how, says Manish Tripathi, founder and chairman of the Dabbawala Foundation. How do we collect 130,000 dabbas from homes all across Mumbai and deliver them to offices throughout the city in time for lunch? How do we reverse it by collecting them again and returning them? How do we do it accurately? Without technology? Without cars? The dabbawala system is built around three things: the dabbawala himself, the coding system they use on the dabbas and the Mumbai train system. The train system makes it possible, says Manish, adding that the dabbawalas operate a relay system. The dabbawala who collects your lunch may not be the same as the one who delivers it. Each morning from 9am to 10am, the 5,000 dabbawalas working in groups of 15 to 20 collect the freshly cooked meals from homes located in the area their group covers. Some customers opt to have their food prepared by a restaurant and have the dabbawala pick up the meal there. Each dabbawala can collect up to 20 dabbas a day, says Manish.
The dabbawalas operate on a relay system with each dabbawala collecting up to 20 dabbas a day

The dabbas are marked with a unique coding system that

gives details of the destination, the dabbawala responsible, the customers name and train station nearest to the customers home. We dont write addresses down because they are in the mind of the dabbawala, says Manish. The dabbawalas employ a hub-and-spoke distribution system. The groups congregate at several main stations, such as Kurla and Churchgate, to sort dabbas based on their destinations. By 10.30am, the dabbawalas have boarded the trains either with the iconic wooden crates filled with dabbas or with the dabbas in hand. When they arrive, the dabbas are once again sorted based on the final office destination. From 12 noon to 1pm the dabbas are delivered and the dabbawalas break for lunch. We have been asked if we steal the food we carry for our own lunches, says Manish with a grin. No! The dabbawala will bring along his own food from home. After lunch, the now-empty dabbas are collected from the offices and, at 3pm, the dabbawalas board the trains back to their stations of origin. If someone tends to eat his lunch late and so cannot be finished by 2.30pm, he will keep two dabbas and will give the dabbawala the one he emptied the day before, says Manish. As office workers travel at rush hour when the trains are most crowded, they are unable to carry the dabbas themselves, adds Manish. The dabbas are then sorted again at the station based on their home destinations and returned by 5pm. There are no mistakes because the dabbawala cares. It would be terrible for a vegetarian to receive a non-vegetarians meal, for example, says Manish.

Mumbai Dabbawallas
Before cutting to the management mantras, let's understand a few facts about our dabbawallas. The origin of the Dabbawalas' lunch delivery service dates back to the 1890s during the British raj. At that time, people from various communities migrated to Mumbai for work. As there were no canteens or fast food centers then, if working people did not bring their lunch from home, they had to go hungry and invariably, lunch would not be ready when they left home for work. Besides, different communities had different tastes and preferences which could only be satisfied by a home-cooked meal. Recognizing the need, Mahadeo Havaji Bacche (Mahadeo), a migrant from North Maharashtra, started the lunch delivery service. For his enterprise, Mahadeo recruited youth from the villages neighboring Mumbai, who were involved in agricultural work. They were willing to come as the income they got from agriculture was not enough to support their large families, and they had no education or skills to get work in the city. The service started with about 100 Dabbawalas and cost the client Rs.2 a month. Gradually, the number of Dabbawalas increased and the service continued even though the founder was no more. Their mission is to serve their customers -- who are mainly office goers -- by delivering their lunch boxes at their doorstep on time. They have 5,000 people on their payroll to ensure the prompt delivery of

lunchboxes within Mumbai; these 'delivery boys' travel by local trains and use bicycles or walk to reach every nook and corner of Mumbai. The lunch boxes are delivered exactly at 12.30 pm. Later, the empty boxes are collected and taken back to the homes, catering services or hotels before 5 pm. In fact, the next time you forget to strap on your watch before leaving for office, don't be surprised to find it in the lunchbox container brought by the dabbawalla from your home! On an average, every tiffin box changes hands four times and travels 60-70 kilometres in its journey to reach its eventual destination. Each box is differentiated and sorted along the route on the basis of markings on the lid, which give an indication of the source as well as the destination address. How the dabba is delivered The first dabbawalla picks up the tiffin from home and takes it to the nearest railway station. The second dabbawalla sorts out the dabbas at the railway station according to destination and puts them in the luggage carriage. The third one travels with the dabbas to the railway stations nearest to the destinations. The fourth one picks up dabbas from the railway station and drops them of at the offices. The process is reversed in the evenings.

Mumbai has an estimated 5,000 tiffin carriers -dabbawallas (literal translation- the can-carriers) delivering about 175,000 lunch boxes every day. The business is centiry old and evolved over a period of time - and the efficiency of the process have earned the dabbawallas a six-sigma rating from Forbes magazine. The Six Sigma quality certification was established by the International Quality Federation in 1986, to judge the quality standards of an organisation. According to an article published in Forbes magazine in 1998, one mistake for every eight million deliveries constitutes Six Sigma quality standards. The Sixsigma rating means that they have a 99.99 % efficiency in delivering the lunch-boxes to the right people. That put them on the list of Six Sigma rated companies, along with multinationals like Motorola and GE. Achieving this rating was no mean feat, considering that the Dabbawalas did not use any technology or paperwork, and that most of them were illiterate or semiliterate. Apart from Forbes, the Dabbawalas have aroused the interest of many other international organizations, media and academia. In 1998, two Dutch filmmakers, Jascha De Wilde and Chris Relleke made a documentary called 'Dabbawallahs, Mumbai's unique lunch service'. The film focussed on how the tradition of eating homecooked meals, and a business based on that, could survive in a cosmopolitan city like Mumbai. In July 2001, The Christian Science Monitor, an international newspaper published from Boston, Mass., USA, covered the Dabbawalas in an article called 'Fastest Food: It's Big Mac vs. Bombay's dabbawallahs' . In 2002, Jonathan Harley, a reporter, did a story on the Dabbawalas with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). In 2003, BBC also aired a program on the Dabbawalas, which was part of a series on unique businesses of the world. In 2003, Paul S. Goodman and Denise Rousseau, both faculty at the Graduate School of Industrial Administration of Carnegie Mellon University, made their first full-length documentary called 'The Dabbawallas'. Back home, the Dabbawalas were invited to speak at Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) meets and at leading Indian business schools such as IIM, Bangalore and Lucknow. Secretary of the Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Charity Trust Gangaram Talekar and M Medge, a tiffin carrier contractor both essentially dabbawallas have been delivering lectures at premier institutes like the IIMs, CII conferences, Symbiosis institutes, WTC, for the last six years. Their indigenously developed tracking system has been studied by management institutes and gurus, and Prince Charles, when he came to Mumbai in 2003, met them and had a chat with them. So far, only two people in Mumbai, India's financial capital have been invited for the wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles. And they are not Mumbai's gliteratti - they are the dabbawallas - tiffin carriers - who are in the business of reaching home-

cooked lunches to Mumbai's working millions. Dabbawala methodology "Error is horror," said Talekar while explaining the operational motto. In the event of a dabbawalla meeting with an accident en route, alternative arrangements are made to deliver the lunch boxes. For example, in a group of 30 dabbawallas catering to an area, five people act as redundant members; it is these members who take on the responsibility of delivering the dabbas in case of any untoward happenings. The dabbawallas must be extremely disciplined. Consuming alcohol while on duty attracts a fine of Rs 1,000. Unwarranted absenteeism is not tolerated and is treated with a similar fine. Every dabbawalla gets a weekly off, usually on Sunday. The Gandhi cap serves as a potent symbol of identification in the crowded railway stations. Not wearing the cap attracts a fine of Rs 25. In fact, Richard Branson, the maverick businessman who is never shy to promote himself and the Virgin brand, donned a Gandhi topi and dhoti (the dabbawallas' signature dress code), during the launch of Virgin's inaugural flights to Mumbai. There are no specific selection criteria like age, sex or religion; however, I have never seen a female dabbawalla. The antecedents of the candidates are thoroughly verified and a new employee is taken into the fold for a six-month probation. After that period, the employment is regularised with a salary of Rs 5,000 a month.

Here is a clutch of statistics that reveals the task that the dabbawallas are up to: History : Started in 1880 Average Literacy Rate : 8th Grade Schooling Average Area Coverage : 60 Km per Tiffin Box Employee Strength : 5000 Number of Tiffins : 2,00,000 Tiffin Boxes, i.e., 4,00,000 transactions every day Time Taken : 3 hours (9 am - 12 pm delivery of carriers, 2 pm - 5 pm collection of empty carriers) Cost of Service : Rs. 200/- - Rs. 300/- per month Turnover : Rs. 50 crore per month approximately