Dabbawalas

Have you ever heard of the dabbawalas?  Well, you probably have if you have lived in India, especially in Mumbai.  They are a “lunchbox delivery and return system that delivers hot lunches from homes and restaurants to people at work in India.”  Dabbawala literally means “one who carries a box.”  The dabba is an aluminum or tin cylinder that has three or four tiers inside it.  Each part of a meal is placed in a different section of the tier and is removed by unlocking a small catch on either side of the handle.

An estimated 175,000 to 200,000 lunch boxes, or tiffin boxes, are transported by 4,500 to 5,000 dabbawalas each day.  The meals are picked up each morning and delivered using predominantly bicycles and railway trains.  The empty boxes are then picked up and returned each afternoon.

The service was established in 1890, in what was then known as Bombay, by Mahadeo Havaji Bachche.  At the time, he had only around 100 men helping him deliver the food.  Over the years, the service has developed a simple, yet highly-effective marking and tracking system that has resulted in only an estimated one mistake in every sixteen million deliveries!  That’s about one mistake every two and half months.  This astonishing result has actually brought delivery moguls from all over the world to India to learn from the dabbawalas on how to improve their own efficiency.

Since most of the dabbawalas are either illiterate or of very low education, the marking and tracking system uses colors and symbols to mark the containers.  The markings contain symbols for the group that picked the food up, the railway station the food was sent, the railway station the food should be removed, the group that should deliver the food, the destination building, and the floor of the building.  The same system is then used in reverse to deliver the container back to the supplier of the food.  Containers are collected and taken to a sorting location, where the boxes are sorted into delivery groups.  The grouped boxes are then placed on train cars by destination and sent to the correct railway station, where they are unloaded and handed over to another dabbawala for delivery.

This group of men are so dedicated to their jobs that they will deliver their boxes regardless of the weather.  When a monsoon wreaked havoc over the area a few years ago, producing terrible flooding and shutting down the railway stations; the dabbawalas took to foot, trudging through the high water with the boxes on their backs.  And they do all of this for around $130 a month!

The demand for the dabbawala delivery service is so high that companies have started contracting them for delivery of other types of goods and services as well.  Several years ago, it was estimated that the service was steadily growing at a rate of 5-10% per year.  Not bad for a group that’s been around for over 125 years and still largely operates on foot, bicycle, and train!