Dabbawala Tour:

For anyone who has ever been to Mumbai, the Dabbawalas are a special class of people who everyone knows!

For the uninitiated though – Who is a Dabbawalla?

The word “dabbawala” in Hindi when literally translated, means “one who carries a box”.

“Dabba” means a box (usually a cylindrical tin or aluminum container).

The closest meaning of the dabbawala in English would be the “lunch box delivery man”

The dabbawalas (also spelled dabbawallas or dabbawallahs, called tiffin wallahs in older sources)

constitute a lunchbox delivery and return system that delivers hot lunches from homes and restaurants to

people at work in India, especially in Mumbai. The lunchboxes are picked up in the late morning, delivered

predominantly using bicycles and railway trains, and returned empty in the afternoon.

They are also used by meal suppliers in Mumbai, who pay them to ferry lunchboxes with ready-cooked meals

from central kitchens to customers and back. The 2013 Bollywood film The Lunchbox is based on the dabbawala service.

Each day throughout the city of Mumbai, 5,000 of the dabbawalas deliver some 130,000 dabbas

to offices throughout the metropolis. In the nearly 120 years of this service, the dabbawalas’

approach has remained consistent: a semi-literate workforce (the dabbawalas) pick up the filled dabbas

from the households that prepare them and deliver the boxes to the requisite offices; they then retrieve

the empty dabbas from these delivery points and returned them to the originating households, in order to begin the process again the next day. Roughly 260,000 transactions are completed within 6 hours each day, 6 days a week, 51 weeks a year, and operating at a quality level comparable to Six Sigma processes. Moreover, this operational excellence is accomplished in the absence of technology, such as computers or even cell phones.

Stories – like the remarkable one that the Dabbawalas have, inspire teams to relook at their own paradigms with fresh new eyes.