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OFFTRACK: MUMBAI, MAHARASHTRA
Delivering The Goods
Forbes
rates the lunch-box carriers of Mumbai on a par with Motorola
By Sandeep
Unnithan
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FOOD EXPRESS: The dabbawallahs ferry 1.5 lakh lunches daily with
the help of simple codes
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It was an unusual
story by Forbes Global, A marked departure from its sought-after macro-economic
reviews and corporate analyses. The US-based business magazine recently
zeroed in on Mumbai's dabbawallah. The lunch logisticians who deliver
1.5 lakh lunch boxes to hungry officegoers every day have in the past
found mention in the Indian press, but the Forbes story was the first
time an international organisation had analysed them scientifically and
rated them as if they comprised a corporate body. And the conclusions
were more than flattering.
The dabbawallahs scored a 6 Sigma performance
rating, a term used in quality assurance if the percentage of correctness
is 99.999999 or more. In simple words, this means one error in six million
transactions, a benchmark reserved for bluechip companies like Motorola.
For the humble dabbawallah, it was a treasured feather in his Gandhi cap.
But the ground realities for him will not change.
His story begins every sultry Mumbai morning
at 9 a.m. sharp. The doorbell rings at the Bhalekar residence in Dahisar,
a far-flung suburb, in a ritual that is being played out simultaneously
in thousands of Mumbai homes. Vrinda Bhalekar hands over an aluminum container
with piping hot lunch for her husband to a middle-aged man wearing the
regulation white cap. In an hour's time, the man will have collected 30
such dabbas (lunch boxes) to pass on to a waiting colleague at the local
railway station.
It's not easy covering so many houses quickly
in a city like Mumbai. The heat and the crawling peak-hour traffic make
reaching a home a task in itself. At each stop the dabbawallah has to
park his cycle at the gate, go to the client's flat which invariably means
an elevator ride up a highrise, collect the lunch and then come down again.
But it is a part of the daily grind. Just as
it is for his colleague who sweats it out in the crowded local train to
reach, say, south Mumbai's Churchgate terminus by 11.30 a.m. There groups
of team members effortlessly sort out the tiffins-thousands of them in
less than 10 minutes-while others pack their carts with the boxes and
dash off to the office districts. By noon, Bhalekar and thousands like
him have warm food in front of them. The entire process is reversed after
the meal and Bhalekar's dabba reaches home well before he does.
Behind this reliable-as-clockwork system is
a relay of 4,500 hardworking dabbawallahs and a simple but effective coding
system. The residential address, office address, railway stations of delivery
and pick up are all crunched into a small series of letters and numbers,
hand-painted on each client's tiffin. For instance, Bhalekar's lunch would
carry the coding 3MC4, 3 for the carrier who delivers in Nariman Point,
MC for his office in Mafatlal Centre and 4 for the floor his office is
located on. In another code below it, 10 is the number for the Churchgate
station where the tiffin is offloaded and D for Dahisar station where
it was collected. So advanced, and so loved by the people, is the service
that you can order it from online grocery store webrishi.com.
Despite such facilities and efficiency-a level
which Forbes noted "western businesses can only aspire to"-the
service comes at an amazingly cheap fee of Rs 150 a month, the price determined
somewhat by the recession in the business. From its peak days in 1955
with deliveries of over two lakh tiffins per day, the century-old trade
received its first blow when bank employees began leaving home early with
the change in office timings in the late 1960s. The rapid closure of mills
in the 1980s-'90s also robbed the dabbawallah of his largest clientele,
the millworkers. Now, canteens and food courts in the office districts
have taken their toll. The money collected by the dabbawallah goes into
the cooperative pool that he belongs to. Out of the accumulated fund,
he is paid a monthly salary of Rs 3,000 or so.
But no one is complaining. Raghunath Medge,
president of the Nutan Mumbai Tiffinbox Suppliers' Charity Trust, is undeterred.
To him, all that matters is his ability to deliver. "We make a mistake
perhaps once in two months. Our livelihood depends on delivering efficiently,"
he says. Competition for Federal Express?
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