Meals on wheels, Indian style

MUMBAI // For the past decade Bhasker Manzoor has followed the same routine with clockwork precision. At 8am he leaves home and begins a frenetic round of 40 house calls collecting freshly cooked packed lunches, all before 11am. Then, he embarks on another whirlwind tour of traffic-clogged Mumbai to deliver them all by 12.30pm. There is only time for a quick bite himself before he is off again on his bicycle, whizzing from one location to another collecting the empty tiffin boxes.

Mr Manzoor, 38, is one of Mumbai's celebrated dabbawallas, a network of 5,000 lunch box delivery men and women who keep the world's fourth most populated city ticking by ensuring thousands of office workers and schoolchildren are nourished with steaming home-cooked food. The concept may be a simple one - door-to-door deliveries of 200,000 freshly made meals a day - but so precise is the system without the use of a single computer, calculator or paper trail that despite relying on largely illiterate workers, only one in six million deliveries goes astray.

So accurate are their timings as they negotiate the 1,000 square kilometres of India's busiest city on bicycle and train that Forbes business magazine recently gave them a six-sigma ranking, equivalent to a 99.9999 success rate and putting dabbawallas on a par with the likes of General Electric and Motorola in terms of efficiency and quality of service. Since the first dabba, or lunch box, was delivered in 1890, dabbawallas have ensured Mumbaikers - as residents of Mumbai are known - get their lunches on their desks on time, six days a week, whether there is blazing heat or a monsoon raging outside.

"We first started 119 years ago, and we will still be going 100 years from now," said Manish Tripathi, chairman of the Dabbawalla Foundation, an organisation set up to resolve disputes and provide security for its members. "When the system started, there were only 35 dabbawallas. Now there are about 5,000, each delivering 40 boxes. "Most are not educated so we do not use technology and each dabbawalla only earns 7,000 rupees [Dh500] a month, which is not a huge amount.

"But the system works because they are very hardworking and disciplined. Mumbaikers love home-cooked food prepared by their wives and mothers. "You can only eat out once a month or once a week at most. What people want to eat most is fresh, hot food from the home." He credited "belief and religion" for ensuring tens of thousands of meals were delivered daily. "Our religion is serving food because we feel we are serving God when we do so," he said.

But the network's efficiency probably has less to do with devotion and rather more to do with the geography of Mumbai, which is built on a long, narrow stretch of land, and a cheap, reliable train system running from the city centre to the furthermost reaches of its urban sprawl, connecting its 19 million inhabitants to the heart of the financial hub. The concept was originally whipped up by Mahadeo Havaji Bachche, an Indian who saw a gap in the market when members of the British Raj turned up their noses at the local spicy food and worried about the hygiene of street hawker fare.

A century on, Prince Charles was so impressed by the legendary Indian institution that he insisted on seeing dabbawallas in action during a visit to the country six years ago, fitting in around their schedule to avoid disrupting their service. And when Raghunath Medge and Sopan More, two long-standing dabbawallas, sent a turban and sari as gifts for his 2005 wedding to Camilla Parker Bowles, the future king of England invited them to join in the festivities, making them the only Indians present at the royal occasion.

Most dabbawallas rise at dawn and embark on their first house calls by 8am, usually on bicycle. It can take a couple of hours to collect up to 40 tiffins, metal pails with several compartments usually containing lentil and meat curries, roti bread and rice, prepared lovingly that morning by the women of the household for their husbands or children. By 11am, dressed in white cotton dhotis and Nehru caps, they assemble at a number of distribution points, which include the city's VT Terminus and Churchgate train stations.

The tiffins are sorted at lightning speed according to their destination, and identified by crude colour and number codes as 85 per cent of the delivery men cannot read properly. VP, for example, refers to the Vile Parle area while the letter E indicates the Express commercial building. The tiffins are loaded onto 1.5 metre-long wooden crates weighing up to 100kg, carried onto train compartments on the heads of other dabbawallas and met at the other end by yet more delivery men who whizz them to their destinations by bicycle.

Each tiffin changes hands an average of four times in the complex relay system, which runs with astonishing efficiency. After a brief lunch break - eaten, of course, from tiffins supplied by their wives - the dabbawallas are off again by 1.30pm, repeating the same process in reverse to collect the empty lunch boxes. The lack of technology and use of basic manpower means the service is kept to a minimal 300 rupees per customer every month.

The only concession to modern technology was the recent introduction of a text message ordering service while future plans include being able to order dabbas online. Dabbawallas' business strategy has been so admired around the world that they have been sought to give lectures to universities and companies including Sir Richard Branson's Virgin group, Stanford University in the United States, the Reserve Bank of India and chartered accountancy firms in Abu Dhabi and Dubai.

"In 119 years we have never once gone on strike," said Mr Tripathi. "Mumbai's trains are very packed so commuters do not want to carry their own lunches on board - but everyone makes room for the dabbawallas. They are a Mumbai institution." Nearly all the tiffin carriers come from the same small farming village near Pune outside Mumbai, belong to the Vakari sect and speak the same Marathi language. Many are born into the industry and see it as a lifelong career.

Mr Manzoor said: "I have been doing it for 10 years and before me, my father Washi, who is 60, did it for 25 years. I have been doing this for so long, I can complete all my morning collections within an hour." Barku Phapale, 38, who also delivers tiffins, said: "My father was a farmer. I got into this because my brother was a dabbawalla and when I left school I did not know what else to do. "In a way, it is what I was born to do. There were not many other options for someone with my background. I have a 10-year-old son, Pramath, but I am not sure whether I want him to follow in my footsteps.

"I want him to aim for the stars but who knows what his destiny will be?" Indus Discoveries, a tour company, offers tourists the opportunity to spend a day with dabbawallas. "The dabbawallas can go where vehicles cannot reach, which makes them so speedy," said Yasin Zargar, Indus' s managing director. "Many know their customers by heart so it does not matter that they are illiterate or do not use computers. In today's age of technology that is unique."

tyaqoob@thenational.ae