Mumbai - The Dabbawallahs
Teamwork and timing in action
I am standing near Mumbai’s Churchgate Station in the commercial hub of the city. It is almost noon, and about five hundred yards away, I catch a glimpse of a man I have been waiting to see. He wears a loose white shirt, cotton pajamas, and, the trade mark of his profession, a white “Nehru” cap.
His name is Naru Bhade and he is with a group of similarly clad men who are frantically sorting out about a hundred cylindrical metal containers (“dabbas”) set out on the sidewalk. Some are being hitched to the handles and back-carriers of bicycles, while others are placed on wheeled wooden trolleys.
Bhade and his fellow-workers are dabbawallahs (“dabba” translates as lunch ‘box’ or ‘tiffin carrier’; “wallah” means a ‘man’). In the next hour, he and his team, along with about 5,000 other dabbawallahs (emerging from other suburban railway stations) will deliver approximately 170,000 lunches from suburban households, to schools, colleges, mills and offices spread across the entire city and its environs. Their customers are middle-class citizens, who for reasons of economy, hygiene, caste and dietary restrictions-or simply because they prefer wholesome food from their own kitchens-rely on the dabbawallahs to deliver a home-cooked midday meal.
Amazingly enough, most of the dabbawallahs are illiterate. Yet, according to a report published by Forbes Global Magazine in 1998, they reputedly only make one mistake for every eight million lunches delivered-a record that would be the envy of most multinational companies, not to mention Canada Post. How do they do it? Each tiffin-carrier lid carries a complex coding system: colours identify each suburb, and individual sectors of the downtown core. Dashes, crosses and dots pinpoint the street, the building and even the floor to which the dabba will be delivered, and eventually returned to its source.
The entire system depends on teamwork and meticulous timing. Depending upon the distance to be covered, dabbas are collected from customers’ homes between 7 and 8 o’clock in the morning, and taken to the nearest suburban railway station. At various intermediary suburban stations, the tiffin containers, are hauled onto platforms and sorted out for area-wise distribution, so that a single dabba could change hands three to four times in the course of its daily journey. At Mumbai’s downtown terminus stations, the last link in the chain-a final relay of dabawallahs-fan out to specific locations. After lunch hour is over, the whole process goes into reverse, and the dabbas are returned to suburban households, by 6 in the evening.
Bhade and his co-workers work 12 hours a day, year round, no matter the gruelling heat of May, and the drenching monsoon months of June, July and August. They cycle distances of up to ten miles in the city, or lope along pushing a trolley stacked with tiffin-carriers, through the chaos of Mumbai’s traffic-choked streets arriving just before lunch time at 1.00 p.m.
All for a monthly fee of about Rs.175 (Can.$6.25) per customer. With an average load of twenty dabbas per man, they net approximately Rs.3,000 (Can $107) per month, after meeting the costs of rail passes and rent for their trolleys or cycles. Each of them is a small entrepreneur, running his own business, and although their earnings may seem meagre by western standards, most dabbawallas have enough cash left over after covering housing and food expenses, to send home to their wives and families in their villages.
The dabbawallahs are unique to Mumbai, and their delivery service has been in existence for the better part of a century. Yet times are changing.
Mumbai’s trendy young executives lead affluent life-styles which have much in common with their counterparts in the west. “My wife holds down a full time job,” says Minoo Bharucha, a financial consultant. “There’s no way she’d be able to cook lunch for our family. I usually eat out, either with my colleagues or business associates.” Vinay Nadkarni, a computer technician, agrees. “I think the dabbawallahs will soon be a thing of the past. We don’t have time for sitting down to elaborate midday meals.” His lunch often consists of a pau-bhaji sandwich, or a slice or two of pizza from a take-out stall.
Does this prospect worry Bhade? I visualize him returning at 7 o’clock to his tin and tarpaper shack which he shares with his brother, two nephews and an uncle-all of them dabbawallas from his village. He will sit down for a chat, sip a cup of chai, smoke a couple of beedies (cheap Indian cigarettes), and then, later, eat his frugal dinner of rotis, dal and lime pickle. Perhaps as he sleeps on his thin mat on the floor, he will dream of his wife and children. He is fifty-one years old and he knows better than to worry about what tomorrow might bring. All he knows is that in the mango-light of dawn, he will wake up, pump his bicycle tires and plunge once more, with his cargo of dabbas, into the churning and insatiable maw of India’s most populous city
If you go:
To see the dabbawallahs in action drop by Mumbai’s Churchgate Station or the suburban section of Chhatrapati Shivaji Station (also known as Victoria Terminus) between 11 a.m. and 12 noon on any working day.
Author: Margaret Deefholts
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