Dabbawalla

In honor of the dabbawallas of India, this website will track their history, their present and their future, while at the same time paying homage to their perseverance and chutzpah. Let's all be dabbawallas in our lives here on Earth! Contact this website at: danbloom [AT] gmail DOT com

Lunch box carriers get cell phones

By Pamela Raghunath
Correspondent
http://archive.gulfnews.com/articles/06/06/29/10050143.html

Mumbai: The ubiquitous dabbawallas -- or lunch box carriers -- of Mumbai are going high-tech to reach out to new customers, and can now be reached via mobile phone text messages.
The once quiet and efficient job of picking up food cooked at home in the morning to be delivered in offices at lunch time has not changed at all during the last 115 years.

Before the advent of mobile phones when telephones cracked up all the time, wives even sent notes to their husbands in the boxes. But now the dabbawallas have been coaxed in to becoming techno-savvy to spread their service across the city.


Now dabbawallas can be contacted by anyone seeking their lunch box (also called tiffin box or dabba) delivery service via SMS.

An instant reply, which also suggests you to visit their website, will be received and a dabbawalla will soon contact his potential customer.

"It's barely a week since the service was started and the response has been so far good," says Niraj Ruparel of Active Media, a technology company that is providing the service to the dabbawalla's association.

"We will be soon compiling all the data that we have received," he says.

Raghunath Medage, President, Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Charity Trust, that manages the vast delivery service, says, "This food delivery service is possible only in Mumbai because of its unique geographical situation and infrastructure.

"Moreover, the food habits differ here. South Indians want their own type of food and so do Maharashtrians or Gujaratis."

Since this is a long city where residences are in the north and offices in the south, their job becomes more simple, he says.

Their success can also be attributed to the suburban rail network. An attempt to start the service in Delhi did not work, he says.

Every day, around 4,500 workers deliver around 200,000 lunch boxes in the offices of Mumbai city. The process begins early in the morning when tiffin boxes are collected from houses and taken to the nearest railway station where boxes are sorted out, placed in huge trays, each carrying 40 boxes, and loaded into trains.

Commuters on rail platforms have to regularly protect their heads from being hit by the wooden trays carried on the heads of dabbawallas, who are perennially in a rush.

The colour-coded tiffins are then quickly sorted by another set of delivery men at the stations to be distributed in the offices by noon. The whole process then starts in the reverse.

The precision and speed with which they work has baffled many a management expert. "We have been regularly giving presentations of our dabba delivery system at many management colleges," says Medage.

Sir Richard Branson, Virgin Atlantic's billionaire owner and Britain's Prince Charles are among many celebrities who have met the deliverymen for a chat about their intricate delivery system.


Think out of the box, dabbawallas counsel ISB

SATYA NAAGESH AYYAGARY

Posted online: Sunday, June 25, 2006 at 0024 hours IST








HYDERABAD, JUNE 24: “You received the Six Sigma Award.”
“Sone ka ya peetal ka?” (Is it of gold or bronze?) “Aur kisko mila? (Who else got it?)
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“Motorola ko!”
“Woh kaun hai? Hoga koi hamara jaise dabbawalla bhai!” (Who is that? Must be some lunch carrier like us.)
This conversation between a management researcher and a team of dabbawallas from Mumbai some years ago, reminisced by Gangaram L Talekar, secretary, Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Association (NMTBSA) here, had future business and thought leaders in splits at the Indian School of Business (ISB) on Saturday.
Without knowing what Six Sigma is, Mumbai’s semi-literate dabbawalas have been delivering just that. Consider this. A 115-year old enterprise, a customer base of two lakh, four lakh operations (pickup, delivery and return) a day using multimodal transport (on foot, bicycle, trolley and local train), employee strength of 5,000, and a turnover of Rs 36 crore. It could well be FedEX or DHL, sans the turnover. The error rate is an astounding one in 16 million transactions thus achieving a Six Sigma (99.999999) perform- ance, and without technological back-up.
Long before marketing guru Theodore Levitt coined the now ubiquitous marketing dictum “Customer is King,” it was faith for the dabbawallas. Recalls Raghunath Medge, president, NMTBSA, on how the UK Consulate staff called to inform that Prince Charles was interested in meeting them at a particular time. “Hum ne bola hum maante hain ki woh London ke raja hai. Magar humara raja to hamara customer hai. Woh bade raja hai.” (We told them that we agree that he is the king of London, but our king is our customer. He is the bigger king!)
The dabbawalas today are tentatively adopting change in the information age. After initial reluctance, they now have a website: www.mydabbawala.com. “The reason was to be a source of information, and contact point as many did not know how to reach us,” says Tripathi.
Going another step further, the dabbawallas have launched a SMS service, to receive feedback and even to become a customer. Cross-selling of products is next in the line, while the actual dabbas themselves become unusual channels for advertising and promotion.
That’s Bharat teaching India.