A dabbawala (one who carries the box), sometimes spelled dabbawalla , tiffinwalla , tiffinwalla or dabbawallah, is a person in the Indian city of Mumbai whose job is to carry and deliver freshly made food from home in lunch boxes to office workers. Tiffin is an old-fashioned English word for a light lunch, and sometimes for the box it is carried in. Dabbawalas are sometimes called tiffin-wallas.
Though the work sounds simple, it is actually a highly specialized trade that is over a century old and which has become integral to Mumbai's culture.
The dabbawala originated when a person named Mahadeo Havaji Bachche started the lunch delivery service with about 100 men. Nowadays, Indian businessmen are the main customers for the dabbawalas.
* Started in 1890
* Charitable trust: Registered in 1956
* Avg. Literacy Rate: 8th Grade Schooling
* Total area coverage: 60 Kms to 70 Kms
* Employee Strength: 5000
* Number of Tiffin's: 2,00,000 Tiffin Boxes i.e 4,00,000 transactions every day.
* Time taken: 3 hrs
Mumbai’s dabbawalas: heterarchy and responsible
autonomy
In Mumbai, India, 5000 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?
Hungry? Would you like a fresh, hot meal from home? Most managers don't have that choice. It's either
a sandwich, a pizza or a trip to the wine bar/restaurant. Unless you live in Mumbai, that is, where a
small army of 'dabbawalas' picks up 175,000 lunches from homes and delivers them to harried students,
managers and workers every working day. At your desk. 12.30 pm on the dot. Served hot, of course.
And now you can even order over the Internet.
The Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Association is a streamlined 120-year-old organisation with 5000 semiliterate
members providing a quality door-to-door service to a large and loyal customer base.
How has MTBSA managed to survive through these tumultuous years? The answer lies in a twin process
that combines competitive collaboration between team members with a high level of technical
efficiency in logistics management. It works like this...
After the customer leaves for work, her lunch is packed into a tiffin box provided by the dabbawala. A
color-coded notation on the handle identifies its owner and destination. Once the dabbawala has
picked up the tiffin, he moves fast using a combination of bicycles, trains and his two feet.
A BBC crew filming dabbawalas in action was amazed at their speed. "Following our dabbawala wasn't
easy, our film crew quickly lost him in the congestion of the train station. At Victoria Terminus we
found other fast moving dabbawalas, but not our subject... and at Mr Bhapat's ayurvedic pharmacy, the
lunch had arrived long before the film crew," the documentary noted wryly. So, how do they work so
efficiently?
Team work
The entire system depends on teamwork and meticulous timing. Tiffin boxes 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
box could change hands three to four times in the course of its daily journey.
At Mumbai's city 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 tiffin boxes return to
suburban homes by 6.00 pm.
To better understand the complex sorting process, let's take an example. At Vile Parle Station, there
are four groups of dabbawalas. Each has twenty members and each member services 40 customers.
That makes 3,200 tiffin boxes in all. These 3,200 boxes are collected by 9.00 am, reach the station and
are sorted according to their destinations by 10.00 am when the 'Dabbawala Special' train arrives.
VLP : Vile Parle (suburb in Mumbai)
9EX12 : Code for Dabbawalas at Destination
EX : Express Towers (building name)
12 : Floor no.
E : Code for Dabbawala at residential station
3 : Code for destination Station eg. Churchgate Station (Nariman Point)
The railway provides sorting areas on
platforms as well as special
compartments on trains travelling south
During the journey, these 80
dabbawalas regroup according to the
number of boxes to be delivered in a
particular area, and not according to
the groups they actually belong to. If
150 tiffin boxes are to be delivered in
the Grant Road Station area, then four
people are assigned to that station, keeping in mind one person can carry no more than 35-40 boxes.
During the earlier sorting process, each dabbawala would have concentrated on locating only those 40
boxes under his charge, wherever they come from, and this specialisation makes the entire system
efficient and error-free. Typically it takes about ten to fifteen minutes to search, assemble and
arrange 40 tiffin boxes onto a crate, and by 12.30 pm they are delivered to offices.
In a way, MTBSA's system is like the Internet. The Internet relies on a concept called packet switching.
In packet switched networks, voice or data files are sliced into tiny sachets, each with its own coded
address which directs its routing.
These packets are then ferried in bursts, independent of other packets and possibly taking different
routes, across the country or the world, and re-assembled at their destination. Packet switching
maximises network density, but there is a downside: your packets intermingle with other packets and if
the network is overburdened, packets can collide with others, even get misdirected or lost in
cyberspace, and almost certainly not arrive on time.
Elegant logistics
In the dabbawalas' elegant logistics system, using 25 km 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 colour code determines not only packet routing but packet prioritising as lunches
transfer from train to bicycle to foot.
Who are the dabbawalas?
Descendants of soldiers of the legendary Maharashtrian warrior-king Shivaji, dabbawalas belong to the
Malva caste, and arrive in Mumbai from places like Rajgurunagar, Akola, Ambegaon, Junnar and Maashi.
"We believe in employing people from our own community. So whenever there is a vacancy, elders
recommend a relative from their village," says Madhba, a dabbawala.
"Farming earns a pittance, compelling us to move to the city. And the tiffin service is a business of
repute since we are not working under anyone. It's our own business, we are partners, it confers a
higher status in society," says Sambhaji, another dabbawala. "We earn more than many padha-likha
(educated) graduates," adds Khengle smugly.
The proud owner of a BA (Hons) degree, Raghunath Meghe, president of MTBSA, is a rare graduate. He
wanted to be a chartered accountant but couldn't complete the course because of family problems. Of
his three children, his daughter is a graduate working at ICICI, one son is a dabbawala and the younger
son is still studying.
Education till standard seven is a minimum prerequisite. According to Meghe, "This system
accommodates those who didn't or couldn't finish their studies. It's obvious that those who score good
Organisation Structure.........
marks go for higher education and not to do this job, but we have people who have studied up to
standard twelve who couldn't find respectable jobs." There are only two women dabbawalas.
Apart from commitment and dedication, each dabbawala, like any businessman, has to bring some
capital with him. The minimum investment is two bicycles (approximately Rs 4,000 / £50), a wooden
crate for the tiffin boxes (Rs 500 / £6), at least one white cotton kurta-pyjama (Rs 600 £7), and Rs 20 /
£2.50 for the trademark Gandhi topi.
Competitive collaboration
MTBSA is a remarkably flat organisation with just three tiers: the governing council (president, vice
president, general secretary, treasurer and nine directors), the mukadams and the dabbawalas. Its first
office was at Grant Road. Today it has offices near most railway stations.
Here nobody is an employer and none are employees. Each dabbawala considers himself a shareholder
and entrepreneur.
Surprisingly MTBSA is a fairly recent entity: the service is believed to have started in the 1880s but
officially registered itself only in 1968. Growth in membership is organic and dependent on market
conditions.
This decentralised organisation assumed its current form in 1970, the most recent date of
restructuring. Dabbawalas are divided into sub-groups of fifteen to 25, each supervised by four
mukadams. Experienced old-timers, the mukadams are familiar with the colours and codings used in
the complex logistics process.
Their key responsibility is sorting tiffin boxes but they play a critical role in resolving disputes;
maintaining records of receipts and payments; acquiring new customers; and training junior
dabbawalas on handling new customers on their first day.
Each group is financially independent but coordinates with others for deliveries: the service could not
exist otherwise. The process is competitive at the customers' end and united at the delivery end.
Each group is also responsible for day-to-day functioning. And, more important, there is no
organisational structure, managerial layers or explicit control mechanisms. The rationale behind the
business model is to push internal competitiveness, which means that the four Vile Parle groups vie
with each other to acquire new customers.
Building a clientele
The range of customers includes students (both college and school), entrepreneurs of small businesses,
managers, especially bank staff, and mill workers.
They generally tend to be middle-class citizens who, for reasons of economy, hygiene, caste and
dietary restrictions or simply because they prefer wholesome food from their kitchen, rely on the
dabbawala to deliver a home cooked mid-day meal.
New customers are generally acquired through referrals. Some are solicited by dabbawalas on railway
platforms. Addresses are passed on to the dabbawala operating in the specific area, who then visits the
customer to finalize arrangements. Today customers can also log onto a website
www.mydabbawala.com to access the service and, breaking news, as of 20th June 2006, customers can
now order dabbawalas services by text message on their mobile phones.
Service charges vary from Rs 150 / £2 to Rs 300 / £4 per tiffin box per month, depending on location
and collection time. Money is collected in the first week of every month and remitted to the mukadam
on the first Sunday. He then divides the money equally among members of that group. It is assumed
that one dabbawala can handle not more than 30-35 customers given that each tiffin box weighs
around 2 kgs. And this is the benchmark that every group tries to achieve.
Typically, a twenty member group has 675 customers and earns Rs 100,000 / £1,200 per month which is
divided equally even if one dabbawala has 40 customers while another has 30. Groups compete with
each other, but members within a group do not. It's common sense, points out one dabbawala.
One dabbawala could collect 40 tiffin boxes in the same time that it takes another to collect 30. From
his earnings of between Rs 5,000 / £60 to Rs 6,000 / £70, every dabbawala contributes Rs15 per month
to the association. The amount is used for community improvement, loans and marriage halls at
concessionary rates. All problems are usually resolved by association officials whose ruling is binding.
Meetings are held in the office on the 15th of every month. During these meetings, particular emphasis
is paid to customer service. If a tiffin box is lost or stolen, an investigation is promptly instituted.
Customers are allowed to deduct costs from any dabbawala found guilty of such a charge.
If a customer complains of poor service, the association can shift the customer's account to another
dabbawala. No dabbawala is allowed to undercut another.
Before looking into internal disputes, the association charges a token Rs 100 to ensure that only
genuinely aggrieved members interested in a solution come to it with their problems, and the officials'
time is not wasted on petty bickering.
Learnings
Logistics is the new mantra for building competitive advantage, the world over. Mumbai's dabbawalas
developed their home-grown version long before the term was coined.
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 over
a century and more. Is their business model worth replicating in the digital age?
Pradip Thakker, June 2006
Based on an article originally published by The Smart Manager, India's first world class bi-monthly
management magazine – and reproduced with their kind permission.
Mumbai Dabbawala Education Centre, Vikhroli
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