Bombay's Lunchmen

If you stand at Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (Victoria Terminus) or at south Mumbai's second station, Churchgate, close to the start of Marine Drive, either before or after lunch, you are sure to notice an army of simply clothed men hurriedly shuffling flotillas of tin lunchboxes (known as dabbas, or sometimes tiffin carriers). Groups of lunchboxes exchange hands, are sorted, and then furiously loaded onto trains. These folks are some of Mumbai's 5,000 famous dabbawallahs (lunchbox men), who run one of the city's most efficient businesses. Simple coding procedures, lots of haste, and loads of hard work ensures every day that a hot lunch prepared mid-morning by a housewife in north Mumbai reaches the desk of her husband in his office in south Mumbai (or vice versa) still warm. The fee for this service is about Rs. 400 or so per month. The ingenuity of this cottage industry, which delivers some 200,000 lunches a day, has brought about visits from systems managers from across the world keen to understand such a simple but highly competent delivery system.