How do mumbai dabbawalas work

Ghule is among those looking forward to returning to Mumbai. Back in , the profession of the dabbawala began to ensure white collar workers from the Parsi community had home-cooked meals.

Dabbawalas have added new routes and clients — today they deliver lunch to a range of people, including small businessmen, government employees, as well as school and college students. Share Via. By Eeshanpriya M S. Get our Daily News Capsule Subscribe.

For the first timers , these people are known as Dabbawalas. Who they are? These people are a part of the giant organization mostly known as the Dabbawalas of Mumbai. This group is working for the last years. But he moved to Mumbai and started this small business- a kind of food chain.

Today it delivers thousands of lunchboxes without having any error. This is a well settled organization having very strict rules and equality for their workers. All these white cap holders are entrepreneurs in some way, and have an equal share in this organization. Dabbawalas deliver the lunchboxes to the working professionals or others who are using tiffin services either from a tiffin provider or from a restaurant.

This is a chain system of workers who work in the chain in order to deliver food at the exact time. They also deliver back the boxes to the home or the destination from where they have been picked without any flaw.

But to your surprise even after their average literacy being of 8th grade, they are chosen for various management case studies and their management skills are discussed in colleges like Harvard and Stanford. All these Dabbawalas are known for their punctuality and dressing sense. They collect the boxes from homes and in this journey to give them back, there are 6 various destinations where they get transferred from person to person and reach its actual destination.

At Toyota, the group and team leaders are also reserve workers, ready to fill in quickly for any task or function. They need just enough extra capacity to handle problems and emergencies but not so much that it bogs down the operation and becomes wasteful overhead. This minimizes variations that might throw a wrench into the works.

The dabbas, for instance, are all roughly the same size and cylindrical shape. To encourage customers to conform, containers incur an additional fee when, say, they are so large that they require special handling. Unusual containers that interfere with the delivery operation are simply not accepted. This uniformity allows the dabbas to be packed quickly onto crates, which are also a standard size so that they can be efficiently loaded onto trains.

The dabbawalas strictly observe certain rules. Workers are fined or fired for repeated mistakes and negligence. Customers are also expected to abide by the process.

Of course, no process is bulletproof. Dealing with customers who are a few minutes late preparing their dabbas is one thing; handling a citywide disruption like a major traffic jam or a torrential monsoon is an entirely different matter. Dabbawalas, who range in age from 18 to 65, tend to remain in their groups for their entire working lives. There is no mandatory retirement age. As a result members of each team care deeply for one another.

In one group that I observed, an elderly worker who was no longer able to carry large loads of dabbas helped in other ways and was paid the same salary as everybody else. New workers are typically friends or relatives of existing members, and though Mumbai is a melting pot of religions, ethnicities, and dialects, most dabbawalas have the same culture, language, values, work ethic, diet, and religious beliefs.

Many come from the region around the city of Pune and can trace their roots back to warriors who fought in the 17th century for Chhatrapati Shivaji, the founder of the Maratha Empire in western India.

While on the job, the dabbawalas wear the same style of clothes and white Gandhi caps, making them easy to identify. A handful are women, who typically perform administrative functions or special services such as pickup or delivery at irregular times that command a higher fee.

Research by scholars such as Amy Edmondson and Richard Hackman of Harvard has shown that familiarity, bonds, and psychological safety lead to lower error rates. In an era when many companies strive for diversity in their workforce, its downside—less alignment—often is ignored.

There are advantages to uniformity: It creates a strong identity and sets boundaries that are necessary in a highly variable environment. It is all about balance. Of course, corporations typically have much more heterogeneous workforces. For the dabbawalas, that task is akin to delivering medicine to the sick, and serving food is like serving God.

That explains their extreme dedication to their jobs during the floods of July The individual pillars help explain certain aspects of the success of the dabbawalas. But to truly understand how they do what they do, you must look at the whole and consider the ways in which the pillars reinforce one another. Take the coding system. It is simple and visual, which allows a semiliterate workforce to sort dabbas quickly. That allows the use of a hub-and-spoke organization in which railway stations serve as hubs and the need for centralized management is minimal.

This is an important lesson for executives who mistakenly think they can alter just one pillar without taking into account the impact on the other three. Consider what happened when companies like Microsoft and Hindustan Unilever were interested in having advertising materials and product samples delivered along with the dabbas. After conducting trial experiments, the dabbawalas found that the extra time required to affix flyers or samples to the dabbas was too big a disruption to their system, and the projects were tabled.

Over the years, the dabbawalas have received plenty of recommendations for increasing their revenues or improving their operations. But the suggestions are usually rejected after careful scrutiny reveals their impact. Every morning, six days a week, Kiran Gavande tours the Lower Parel neighbourhood of Mumbai on his bicycle collecting lunchboxes called dabbas from his customers.

In the last few years, online food-delivery companies like Deliveroo and Uber Eats have made having specially prepared food brought to your desk seem like the height of app-based luxury. Similar start-ups are gaining popularity in India too.

But dabbawalas have been doing it for years — and the newcomers have much to learn. They make a tidy side-line hosting executives from delivery giants like FedEx and Amazon. Even Richard Branson has spent a day learning their secrets.

Most dabbawalas are quick to dismiss their new digital rivals. The organisation runs its low-cost service at a very high level of performance. With deliveries to and from roughly , customers each day that translates to little more than delayed or missing dabbas in a year. Timeliness is crucial. Lunchboxes have to reach the client by every day and it can take up to three hours to deliver them. The whole city can be affected by late deliveries, says Sangle. Dabbawalas are waved through by members of the public and traffic police alike.

The delivery schedule also has built-in buffers. If a delivery is due at , the dabbawala will aim for around — even if the destination is only a quarter of an hour away, says Sangle. Despite the tight schedule, most of the time dabbawalas appear surprisingly relaxed, joking and chatting as they sort their dabbas.

But when the next stage of the process nears, there is five minutes of sudden intense activity. At a dabbawala races around the corner on a bike and rushes shouting into an office building.