The Dabbawalas of Mumbai

INTRODUCTION

A dabbawala (one who carries the box), sometimes spelled dabbawalla ,

Tiffin Walla , Tiffin Walla 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, and the service often
includes cooking as well as delivery.

A network of (dabba)wallas picks up the boxes from customers’ homes or

from people who cook lunches to order, then delivers the meals to a local railway
station. The boxes are hand-sorted for delivery to different stations in central
Mumbai, and then re-sorted and carried to their destinations. After lunch, the
service reverses, and the empty boxes are delivered back home.

The secret of the system is in the colored codes painted on the side of the
boxes, which tell the dabbawalas where the food comes from and which railway
stations it must pass through on its way to a specific office in a specific building in
downtown Mumbai.

A business that is still growing at the rate of 5 to 10 percent, it has received

the Six Sigma award from the Forbes Magazine. Only those organizations get
the Six Sigma award that can keep their defects at around 1 defect every 6,000,000
(six million) deliveries. This is amazing, and they don’t even get any special
management training. Seth Godin in his post rightly says:

The dabbawalas know their customers. If they rotated the people around, it
would never work. There’s trust, and along with the trust is responsibility. By
creating a flat organization and building relationships, the system even survives
monsoon season.
ACHIVEMENTS

Mumbai's dabbawallas invited for Charles- Camilla wedding

The dabbawallas of Mumbai are attending Prince Charles' wedding to

Camilla Parker Bowles

4 April, 2005: So far, only two people in Mumbai, India's financial capital
have been invited for the wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles.
And they are not Mumbai's gliteratti - they are the dabbawallas - tiffin carriers -
who are in the business of reaching home-cooked lunches to Mumbai's working
millions.

Mumbai has an estimated 5,000 tiffin carriers -dabbawallas delivering

about 175,000 lunch boxes every day. The business is centiry old and evolved
over a period of time - and the efficiency of the process have earned the
dabbawallas a six-sigma rating from Forbes magazine. The Six-sigma rating
means that they have a 99.99 % efficiency in delivering the lunch-boxes to the
right people. Their indigenously developed tracking system has been studied by
management institutes and gurus, and Prince Charles, when he came to Mumbai
in 2003, met them and had a chat with them.

Raghunath Medge, president of the Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers

Association and Sopan Mare, the secretary, are the proud receivers of the
invitation. The invitation was sent on behalf of Prince Charles to the dabbawallas
by the British High Commission. The invitation thanked them for their gifts to
Prince Charles.

When the wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles was
announced, the dabbawallas went looking for traditional gifts to send to them.
They chose a traditional headdress and a sari The two proud dabbawallas will go
to London, but will not stay at the Hilton hotel due to language problems, and
instead will stay at the Sanyas Aashram Trust centre in London.

The dabbawalla representatives do not speak English, and are worried about
it. Their other problem would also be the food, as British cuisine could be
impossible for them to eat. Still, the dabbawallas are looking forward to the
wedding, they say, and will go wearing
Mumbai's Dabbawallas a complete management Concept

1. Threat of New Entrants:

The experience curve of the hundred year old dabbawallas serves as a huge
entry barrier. No one could possibly replicate this supply chain network that uses
Mumbai's jam-packed local trains as its backbone.

2. Current competition:
Dabbawallas face competition from fast food joints and office canteens.
Since, neither of them serves home food, the dabbawallas core offering remains
unchallenged.

3. Bargaining power of buyers:

The rates of the dabbawallas are as it is so nominal that one simply
wouldn't bargain any further. Also, their monopoly status negates any scope of
bargaining from their customers.

4. Bargaining power of sellers:

The use of minimum infrastructure and a total aversion to technology
ensures that they are not dependent on suppliers.

5. Threat of a new substitute product or service:

Nobody has thought of one yet!
THE EXECUTION OF DABBAWALLA’S WORKS

• The first dabbawalla picks up the tiffin from home and takes it to the
nearest railway station.
• The second dabbawalla sorts out the dabbas at the railway station according
to destination and puts them in the luggage carriage.
• The third one travels with the dabbas to the railway stations nearest to the
destinations.
• The fourth one picks up dabbas from the railway station and drops them of
at the offices. The process is reversed in the evenings.

Mumbai has an estimated 5,000 tiffin carriers -dabbawallas (literal

translation- the can-carriers) delivering about 175,000 lunch boxes every day. The
business is centiry old and evolved over a period of time - and the efficiency of the
process have earned the dabbawallas a six-sigma rating from Forbes magazine.

The Six Sigma quality certification was established by the International

Quality Federation in 1986, to judge the quality standards of an organisation.
According to an article published in Forbes magazine in 1998, one mistake for
every eight million deliveries constitutes Six Sigma quality standards. The Six-
sigma rating means that they have a 99.99 % efficiency in delivering the lunch-
boxes to the right people. That put them on the list of Six Sigma rated companies,
along with multinationals like Motorola and GE. Achieving this rating was no
mean feat, considering that the Dabbawalas did not use any technology or
paperwork, and that most of them were illiterate or semiliterate. Apart from
Forbes, the Dabbawalas have aroused the interest of many other international
organizations, media and academia.

In 1998, two Dutch filmmakers, Jascha De Wilde and Chris Relleke

made a documentary called 'Dabbawallahs, Mumbai's unique lunch service'. The
film focussed on how the tradition of eating home-cooked meals, and a business
based on that, could survive in a cosmopolitan city like Mumbai. In July 2001, The
Christian Science Monitor, an international newspaper published from Boston,
Mass., USA, covered the Dabbawalas in an article called 'Fastest Food: It's Big
Mac vs. Bombay's dabbawallahs' . In 2002, Jonathan Harley, a reporter, did a story
on the Dabbawalas with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). In
2003, BBC also aired a program on the Dabbawalas, which was part of a series on
unique businesses of the world. In 2003, Paul S. Goodman and Denise Rousseau,
both faculty at the Graduate School of Industrial Administration of Carnegie
Mellon University, made their first full-length documentary called 'The
Dabbawallas'.
Back home, the Dabbawalas were invited to speak at Confederation of Indian
Industry (CII) meets and at leading Indian business schools such as IIM,
Bangalore and Lucknow. Secretary of the Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers
Charity Trust Gangaram Talekar and M Medge, a tiffin carrier contractor — both
essentially dabbawallas — have been delivering lectures at premier institutes like
the IIMs, CII conferences, Symbiosis institutes, WTC, for the last six years.

A Clutch of statistics that reveals the task that the dabbawallas are up to: -

History : Started in 1880

Average Literacy Rate : 8th Grade Schooling
Average Area Coverage : 60 Km per Tiffin Box
Employee Strength : 5000
Number of Tiffins : 2,00,000 Tiffin Boxes,
i.e., 4,00,000 transactions every day
Time Taken : 3 hours (9 am - 12 pm delivery of carriers,
2 pm - 5 pm collection of empty carriers)
Cost of Service : Rs. 200/- - Rs. 300/- per month
Turnover : Rs. 50 crore per month approximately

FUTURE PLANS ABOUT THEIR HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

In their white Pajamas and Gandhi Topis, they may not sport the
conventional corporate look. But Mumbai’s dabbawalas explained some basic principles
of management with future managers. Crowned with the six-sigma quality standard, the
dabbawalas shared their success mantras with students of Vivekanand Education.

Managing time effectively is not a rocket science that it requires lot of careful
study and dedication but it requires only a little change of attitude. One can organize him-
self, if he tries to analyze his own daily activities and he can easily find where he is
spending his time. He has to ask himself whether the time he is spending is really
productive. He has to prioritize his timing.
 Raghunath Dhondiba, President, Dabbawala Association and Gangaram
Laxman Talekar (Secretary) addressed a large gathering, including students and
professors of different management colleges. The crux of the lecture was that ‘customer
satisfaction’ should be the most important goal of any company.

Time is virtue
Punctuality and time management are on top of the agenda for dabbawallas.
Whatever be the circumstances, employees never getdelayed even by a few minutes. For
years, they have been taking the same trains and buses. “We have to cover a distance of
65 to 75 kilometres a day in three hours; we can’t afford any delay”, says Gangaram
Laxman.

Zero Technological Investment

The whole tiffin distribution requires negligible technology. “This is one of the
reasons why we are successful; our man power is highly efficient”, said Gangaram.
Interestingly, the average literacy at Dabbawallas is up to class VIII, with more than 60
per cent of the total employees still
illiterate. “Intelligent people waste their time in asking questions whereas we only focus
on fulfilling our responsibility”, said Gangaram.

A single weak link breaks the whole chain.

All the members in a team should perform excellent to bring a perfect result.
Corroborating this, Dabbawallas’ honchos explained about different distribution and how
each segment maintains its time-cycle. “Ours is a war against time; we have no space for
lapses”, said president Raghunath.

No discipline, no growth.
The dabbawallas have to follow three rules at any cost.
(a) They have to wear white caps during working hours.
(b) They are not allowed to drink alcohol during working hours.
(c) They have to carry their identity cards

If found flouting these norms, any employee can be punished and fined from Rs 500 to
Rs 1,500. In extreme cases, the person might also be fired from the organization. “A good
leader could never make things run properly if there are flaws in the system”, said
Raghunath. “One should never compromise with the discipline in the organisation, as it
hits the integrity of that association”, he added.

Error rate: 1 in 16 million transactions.

“I do not know the exact meaning of error, but one thing that I know is when you
are serving someone, it is not acceptable to make mistakes”, said Gangaram.
Dabbawallas take 2 lakh tiffin-boxes every day, resulting into the total transactions to 4
lakh per day, still the error rate is one in 16 million transactions. That is how they have
earned Six Sigma certification.
“No Strike” record.
The 5,000 employees of Dabbawallas’ Association have never gone on strike.
“Whenever we feel that there could be dissatisfaction in anyone’s mind, we simply tell
them to take a leave and rest on that day; from the next day, the employee comes without
any annoyance”.

Marketing fundas
Due to their high reach to the commonest people, Dabbawallas’ often carry the
pamphlets, stickers and other marketing material of different companies for a fee.

The highly efficient coding system

Although the average literacy of Dabbawallas’ is class VIII and more than 60 per
cent are illiterate, all of them are well versed in decoding their exclusive coding system.
Each area is divided into several small distribution sectors and each sector is handled by a
particular person. This person understands the address in that locality very well. Also, this
perfection comes with practice. Many new employees work for months under the
guidance

SHARE THE SUCCESS WITH EVERYONE

Success stays forever only when shared equally between all the people who
worked for it. “Howsoever big the organization is, its success depends on the efficiency
of all the employees working for it; so they all need equal respect and gratitude as given
to the senior members”, said the Dabbawalas’ president.

Another lesson that Dabbawallas gave was that real lessons of life are never taught in the
classroom. It is the commitment and determination of a person, which creates wonders.

“Nothing could be as important as the responsibility taken by you; this is the

only principle dabbawallas’ are following for last 116 years”, said Raghunath the
Dabbawalas’ president.