The Story of Mumbai's Dabbawala

A dabbawala (Tiffin Wallah) is a person in Mumbai who collects Tiffin boxes from the residences of the office workers and delivers at their respective workplaces and returning back the empty boxes by using different ways of transport.

Dabbawala concept is a big hit in India and its implemented in other Indian Cities. Instead of going home for lunch or paying for a meal in a café, many office workers have a cooked meal sent either from their home, or sometimes from a caterer who delivers it to them as well, essentially cooking and delivering the meal in lunch boxes and then having the lunch boxes collected and re-sent the next day.

More than 175,000 or 200,000 lunch boxes get moved every day by an estimated 4,500 to 5,000 dabbawalas, all with an extremely small nominal fee and with utmost punctuality (See the man in the picture). According to a recent survey, there is only one mistake in every 6,000,000 deliveries, statistically equivalent to a Six Sigma (99.9999) rating.

The concept of Dabbawala got featured in The Economist and this became a big Case Study in management circles and these case studies became inspiration for management.

Some Facts about Dabbawala

• Search Trend on Google

• People started searching for 

Dabbawala PPT

Six Sigma Dabbawala

Dabbawala Case Study

• This has been featured in ISB (Indian School of Business) as well.
• They have a Twitter Account http://twitter.com/dabbawala and what they say is - "Presently Hardvard Business School is doing a case study on Dabbawala which will be released in August 2009".