Once in a while you find yourself in a place that’s entirely different to anything you’re used to. Last year I discovered India, and to me it’s definitely a completely different world. My stay in India started in Mumbai, where I was not only confronted with incredible service, tons of pollution, poverty living next to wealth, but also I also learned about a unique phenomenon that can only be found in Mumbai: Dabbawalas.
Dabbawalas are actually the secret engine that keeps Mumbai going, the city’s population would be lost without them. No, Dabbawalas is neither a temple nor a sports arena nor a mysterious spiritual group. Dabbawalas are the men that bring lunchboxes around the city (‘dabba’ means box/container, ‘walla’ means man/carrier); it’s as simple as that.
Actually, if you have ever been to Mumbai, there is a chance you had run into one of these men, dressed in white with a white hat and on their shoulders, a big wooden structure with aluminum boxes.
Dabbawala on the road
But what makes them so special? Well, for a start, the approximately 5000 lower-caste men who bring these lunchboxes around are (mostly) illiterate. But they are also ISO certified, they’re in the Guinness Book of Records, with 99,99% accuracy they have the best Sig Sigma rating in the world, they are invited to give presentations at business universities such as Harvard…
Well, you get the idea; they’re pretty good at what they do. And all they do is bringing lunches around.
Their accuracy and skills are so impressive and well known that famous businesspeople like Richard Branson and royals like Prince Charles have visited these men.
Dabbas and Dabbawalas
I’m not sure what the lunch culture is like in your part of the world, but where I come from (The Netherlands), people simply eat bread. For us Dutch, it’s no big deal to bring a few homemade sandwiches to work. Many cultures, including the Indian, prefer to have a hot meal for lunch. Mumbaikars prefer to eat a hot, homemade lunch everyday at work.
That might not sound like a big deal, but Indian food with all its spices is so delicate and full of flavourful that it is best eaten freshly prepared. When men go to work, their wives immediately start preparing their husband’s lunches. You might wonder why these women don’t go around the city themselves to bring the lunch to their husbands, but these women also have to take care of their children. With the traffic and busyness in Mumbai you’ll probably understand it’s quite impossible to quickly bring lunch to someone who is working on the other side of a city with 13.831.000 residents, and a population density of 22.937 people per km². To get a better idea of the immensity of Mumbai; The Netherlands has a population of 16.605.000 people and a density of 400 people per km².
This busy Mumbai is where these brave lunchbox-men come to save the day.
Three Dabbawalas
After the wives (or mothers, or grandmothers) have prepared lunches, they put them in aluminum containers called dabbas. The Dabbawala comes by their house to pick up the box and this is the moment when Dabbawalas do their magic. Through a complex system of colours, letters and numbers, they deliver the lunchboxes to husbands’ offices all throughout Mumbai. A few hours later, they pick up the lunchboxes from offices and deliver them back to the wives.
On a daily basis, somewhere between 175.000 and 200.000 lunchboxes are transported this way, and with about 1 mistake per 6 million deliveries (!) you might understand what makes them such an essential part of Mumbai and so interesting to the rest of the (business) world.
Dabbawala carrying a load on his head
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All pictures are from the Dabbawala-website
