A dabbawala; also spelled as dabbawalla or dabbawallah; is a person in India, most commonly
in Mumbai, who is part of a delivery system that collects hot food in lunch boxes from
the residences of workers in the late morning, delivers the lunches to the workplace utilizing
various modes of transport, predominantly bicycles and the railway trains, and returns
the empty boxes back to the customer's residence that afternoon.
They are also made use of by prominent meal suppliers in Mumbai where they ferry ready,
cooked meals from central kitchens to the customers and back.
In Mumbai, most office goers prefer to eat home cooked food rather than eat outside,
usually for reasons of taste and hygiene, hence the concept.
A number of work-from-home women also supply such home cooked meals, delivering through
the dabbawala network.
Etymology
The word "dabbawala" when literally translated, means "one who carries a box".
"Dabba" means a box, while "wala" is a suffix, denoting a doer or holder of the preceding
word.
The closest meaning of the dabbawala in English would be the "lunch box delivery man".
Origins In 1890, Mahadeo Havaji Bachche started a
lunch delivery service with about a hundred men.
In 1930, he informally attempted to unionize the dabbawallas.
Later, a charitable trust was registered in 1956 under the name of Nutan Mumbai Tiffin
Box Suppliers Trust.
The commercial arm of this trust was registered in 1968 as Mumbai Tiffin Box Supplier's Association.
The current president of the association is Raghunath Medge.
Supply chain A collecting dabbawala, usually on bicycle,
collects dabbas either from a worker's home or from the dabba makers.
As many of the carriers are of limited literacy, the dabbas have some sort of distinguishing
mark on them, such as a colour or group of symbols.
The dabbawala then takes them to a designated sorting place, where he and other collecting
dabbawalas sort the lunch boxes into groups.
The grouped boxes are put in the coaches of trains, with markings to identify the destination
of the box.
The markings include the railway station to unload the boxes and the destination building
delivery address.
At each station, boxes are handed over to a local dabbawala, who delivers them.
The empty boxes are collected after lunch or the next day and sent back to the respective
houses.
Dabbawallas tend to belong to the Varkari sect of Maharashtra and consider Tukaram's
teachings of helping each other to be central to their efficiency and motivation.
Appearance and coding Lunch boxes are usually marked in several
ways: abbreviations for collection points, colour code for starting station, number for
destination station and markings for handling dabbawala at destination, building and floor.
The dabbawalas have started to embrace technology, and now allow for delivery requests through
SMS.
A colour-coding system identifies the destination and recipient.
Each dabbawala is required to contribute a minimum capital in kind, in the form of two
bicycles, a wooden crate for the tiffins, white cotton kurta-pyjamas, and the white
Gandhi cap.
Each month there is a division of the earnings of each unit.
Uninterrupted services The service is almost always uninterrupted,
even on the days of severe weather such as monsoons.
The local dabbawalas and population know each other well, and often form bonds of trust.
Dabbawalas are generally well accustomed to the local areas they cater to, and use shortcuts
and other low profile routes to deliver their goods on time.
Occasionally, people communicate between home and work by putting messages inside the boxes;
however, with the rise of instant communication such as SMS and instant messaging, this trend
is vanishing.
Since 1890, when the dabbawalas formally came into existence, none of them had ever gone
on strike until 2011 when the members decided to head towards Azad Maidan to support Anna
Hazare in his campaign against corruption.
Economic analysis Each dabbawala, regardless of role, is paid
about eight thousand rupees per month.
Between 175,000 and 200,000 lunch boxes are moved by 4,500 to 5,000 dabbawalas, all with
an extremely small nominal fee and with utmost punctuality.
It is frequently claimed that dabbawalas make less than one mistake in every six million
deliveries.
However, this error rate is conservative as it is estimated from Ragunath Medge, the president
of the Mumbai Tiffinmen's Association in 1998, and is not from a rigorous study.
Medge told Subrata Chakravarty, the lead author of the 'Fast Food' article by Forbes.
that dabbawalas make a mistake "almost never, maybe once every two months" and this statement
was extrapolated by Subrata Chakravarty to be a rate of "one mistake in 8 million deliveries."
The ABC has produced a documentary on dabbawalas and Prince Charles visited them during his
visit to India; he had to fit in with their schedule, since their timing was too precise
to permit any flexibility.
Charles also invited them to his wedding with Camilla Parker Bowles in London on 9 April
2005.
Owing to the tremendous publicity, some of the dabbawalas were invited to give guest
lectures in some of the top business schools of India, which is very unusual.
The New York Times reported in 2007 that the 125-year-old dabbawala industry continues
to grow at a rate of 5–10% per year.
Awards, Studies and recognition Awards / Accreditations
ISO 9001:2000 certified by the Joint Accreditation System of Australia and New Zealand
Studies and accolades In 2001, Pawan G. Agrawal carried out his
PhD research in " A Study & Logistics & Supply Chain Management of Dabbawala in Mumbai".
He often presents his results on the efficiency of Dabbawallas in various fora.
In 2005, the Indian Institute of Management featured a case study on the Mumbai Dabbawallas
from a management perspective of logistics.
In 2010, Harvard Business School added the case study The Dabbawala System: On-Time Delivery,
Every Time to their compendium for its high level of service with a low cost and simple
operating system.
Six Sigma myth It has been frequently asserted that dabbawalas
were awarded a Six Sigma certification by Forbes magazine.
This is a myth perpetuated by the news media who inferred the accreditation from the 1998
article in Forbes.
In 2007, an explanation was provided by the lead author of the article, Subrata Chakravarty
in a private email correspondence to Gauri Sanjeev Pathak:
"Forbes never certified the dabbawalas as being a six-sigma organization.
In fact, I never used the term at all.
As you know, six-sigma is a process, not a statistic.
But it is commonly associated with a statistic of 3.4 errors per million operations, and
that is what caused the confusion … . I was impressed by the efficiency and complexity
of the process by which some 175,000 tiffin boxes were sorted, transported, delivered
and returned each day by people who were mostly illiterate and unsophisticated.
I asked the head of the organization how often they made a mistake.
He said almost never, maybe once every two months.
Any more than that would be unforgivable to customers.
I did the math, which works out to one mistake in 8 million deliveries—or 16 million, since
the tiffin carriers are returned home each day.
That is the statistic I used.
Apparently, at a conference in 2002, a reporter asked the president … whether the tiffinwallahs
were a six-sigma organization.
He said he didn't know what that was.
When told about the 3.4 error-per-million statistic, I'm told he said: "Then we are.
Just ask Forbes".
The reporter, obviously without having read my story, wrote that Forbes had certified
the tiffinwallahs as a six-sigma organization.
That phrase was picked up and repeated by other reporters in other stories and now seems
to have become part of the folklore."
World record On 21 March 2011, Prakash Baly Bachche carried
three dabbawalla tiffin crates on his head at one time which was entered as a Guinness
world record.
References
Further reading Shekhar Gupta, Our computer is our head and
our Gandhi cap is the cover to protect it from the sun or rain, Indian Express, Walk
the Talk, NDTV 24x7.
Hart, Jeremy.
"The Mumbai working lunch".
The Independent Online.
Retrieved 2007-03-20.
"Indian lunchbox carriers to attend the Royal nuptials".
Evening Standard.
2005-04-05.
Retrieved 2007-03-20.
Mumbai's Dabbawala: The Uncommon Story of the Common Man, Shobha Bondre.
tr.
Shalaka Walimbe.
OMO Books, 2011.
ISBN 81-910356-1-8.
The Dabbawala System: On-Time Delivery, Every Time, by Stefan H. Thomke and Mona Sinha,
Harvard Business School Case Study, February 2010
External links Official website of Mumbai Dabbawala Association,
Mumbai, India