Where there's a meal there's a way

A coding system, professional pride and decades of experience help keep Mumbai's dabbawallah industry the pinnacle of prompt service, even in one of the most hectic cities on earth. Picture / Reuters

MUMBAI - The traffic lights outside Churchgate Station are red. And for a second the mayhem of Mumbai driving takes a breather. Hawkers are selling everything imaginable to drivers as they wait. Men balanced precariously on bamboo ladders are changing the Bollywood poster above the Art Deco Regal Cinema. Across the road, on a patch of brown grass, kids in whites are chasing the Indian cricket dream.

The most bizarre sight comes, though, when I check my rear-view mirror. There, above the dented roof-tops of black-and-yellow taxis, bob what look like two pall-bearers. Balanced between them is a 1.5m wooden crate, supporting 50 rattling tim tiffin boxes, or lunch containers, known in Mumbai as dabbas. The men are two of the sprawling city's legion of dabbawallahs - tiffin carriers.

Before the lights change, two more pairs of dabbawallahs fire across the bows of my car, so close I fear for my unblemished bodywork (a rarity in Mumbai). They too are heading for Churchgate at the end of a daily operation that feeds half a million people with home-cooked food, delivered to them at work by the dabba army.

Each day, 5000 dabbawallahs descend on apartments across Mumbai to collect a home-made lunch and take it up to 50km across town to office and factory workers.

"The British used dabbawallahs because they wanted their own food for lunch," explains Farida Dordy, a guide who uses a dabbawallah each day. "But they were just one group who preferred to have their own kinds of food for lunch. My husband and I are Parsi. He prefers a Parsi meal, so I or our maid Sulbha will cook him lunch and the dabbawallah will pick it up just after 9.30 each morning."

Most Mumbaikars like to eat hot food for lunch, and many put their trust in the dabbawallah delivering.

Logistically, what the carrier army achieves each day is nigh on impossible. Harvard statisticians have proved as much. Without computers, pretty well without mobile phones, relying on a relay system fraught with the potential for dabbawallahs being late, ill or even dying en route (two did last year), they weave through the city on a spider's web of routes.

Churchgate Station is the hub of the dabbawallah network. At 11am, the station forecourt is packed as the lunch carriers pass their tiffin boxes down a supply chain that Forbes business magazine rated with six stars - as reliable as GE or Motorola.

"They've never lost one of the lunches I do for my husband. In fact I've never heard of them being late or losing one," says Dordy, who pays 300 rupees ($11) a month for the service.

"These guys are not like delivery people in London or New York, doing it for a short time ... they are dabbawallahs for life. They all come from the Sahyadri mountains east of Mumbai, from families who have been dabbawallahs since the 1890s.

"They offer a great service: messages, business, offers of marriage are all sent through the system."

At 2.30pm, about the time I am passing, the dabbawallahs make their return trips through Churchgate. Bicycles and Mumbai's train system are their preferred modes of transport.

"On a bicycle we are king of the road," says DK Choudhry, a dabbawallah I meet the next day at Dordy's house. "We can go through no-entry roads and red lights. You can't do that in your car, can you?" I dare not say yes. Mumbai driving might be free-form but there are still rules.

In terms of car ownership, Mumbai is one of the fastest-growing cities in the world. It won't be long before the infrastructure of India's biggest city has to change to accommodate all the new drivers. How long before dabbawallahs get motorbikes or even cars?

"Never," reckons DK, who each year travels about 10,000km for his job.

DK and I prepare to test whether a car delivery or the traditional dabbawallah methods will win out.

Any moment now, Dordy's regular dabbawallah, Papu, will arrive to pick up lunch and take it to her husband's office. She has prepared a paneer jalfrezi, which will endure a two-hour journey that involves bike, train and three dabbawallahs following a series of codes inscribed on the tiffin box.

Spot on 9.40am, a wiry man in open sandals appears at the door. It is Papu. In 90 seconds he must be gone or he will fall behind schedule. Like a ghost on the wind, Papu is away.

DK comes with me in my car to see if we can get to Dordy's husband's office before delivery at 11.45am. DK has never travelled in any car other than one of the city's marauding taxis.

I fear the shock might distract him from his job, but there is another problem: delayed by my complacency and a delicious breakfast, DK and I leave a half-hour behind Papu; we have about 70 minutes to beat him over 17km.

Twenty years of living in London does nothing to prepare me for the gloves-off fistfight of Mumbai driving. DK, though, is smiling. He seems to be enjoying the experience of a crazy European playing dodgem in his city.

The traffic is glutinous. Each kilometre takes a good 10 minutes. The clock reads 11.35am, and there's still more than a kilometre to run.

Then disaster strikes. In the maze of Colaba, Mumbai's business district, I miss a turning. For what seems like an eternity DK cannot help.

But a unique code on the tiffin box, understandable only to dabbawallahs, pinpoints the area and the street and the building, even the floor number of the delivery address. DK points wildly at a dour 1960s office block to our left. The time is now almost 11.55am.

"You Jeremy?" enquires a suave middle-aged man as we puff out of the lift. I nod. "Glad you're here. We didn't want to start lunch without you."

I am gutted. DK is not sure whether to be disappointed or pleased that we have lost by nearly 20 minutes. "It shows that the old ways are better," he tells me. "The car was much nicer, much more comfortable ... I'd much rather go by car but I might have trouble delivering 35 lunches in time."

Express delivery

Everyone who works within this system is treated as an equal.

Regardless of a dabbawallah's function, everyone gets paid about 2000 to 4000 rupees ($75 to $150) a month.

More than 175,000-200,000 lunches get moved every day by an estimated 4500-5000 dabbawallahs, all with an extremely small nominal fee and with utmost punctuality.

According to a recent survey, there is only one mistake in every 6 million deliveries.

The US business magazine Forbes gave a Six Sigma performance rating for the precision of dabbawallahs.

- INDEPENDENT