Mumbai Dabbawala: Treating Each Customer A Special One

                         

Today, when you see a picture some wherein the newspaper or anywhere else  which shows  a man wearing a white cap having the dabbas(tiffins) in the hand suddenly your mind will click a name  “a Dabbawala”. This is the success of Dabbawalas. Today we are known among the whole world by our working style. We are the people from Mumbai, India. Dabbawalas in Mumbai are nearly 5000 in numbers and all of us are semiliterate workers. People call us from many different names like dabbewala, dabbawalla, Dabbawallah. The only work these 5000 dabbawalas in the Association of Dabbawalaperform is that taking the freshly made food from customer’s home & deliver it to their offices during the lunch time in the tiffin boxes or dabbas with a perfect time accuracy. The number of dabbas we daily deliver is more than 2,00000.As we are not the highly qualified workers, so we don’t have the high class management theories to perform our duty. This is the reason why our work seems to be a wonder to most of the people, so that we achieved many achievements. The name of Dabbawalas is registered in Guinness Book of World Record; we also have a world record in Best Time Management, Dabbawalas were registered in Repley’s  Believe it or Not too. We use a coding system for the dabbas and each dabba moves on 6 different hands during the whole process. Therefore the chances for any mistake is only 0.01%.

The Summary of the Whole Process: The process of carrying and delivering the dabbas is divided into different time slots.  The tiffin after carrying from the customer’s home taken into the  wooden crates and transferred into goods compartment of the train. After that at the destination, unloading takes place and each  tiffin is arranged according to the destination area & building. The dabbas now arranged into the special crate with 150 tiffins. Similarly the tiffins were collected from the destination and in the same way they  reaches to their home. For this work we only charge Rs 200/tiffin per month.