Delivering The Goods : Forbes rates the lunch-box carriers of Mumbai on a par wi th Motorola FOOD EXPRESS: The dabbawallahs

ferry 1.5 lakh lunches daily with the help of sim ple codes. It was an unusual story by Forbes Global, A marked departure from its sought-aft er macro-economic reviews and corporate analyses. The US-based business magazine recently zeroed in on Mumbai's dabbawallah. The lunch> logisticians who deliver 1.5 lakh lunch boxes to hungry office goers every day have in the past found me ntion in the Indian press, but the Forbes story was the first time an internatio nal organization had analyzed them scientifically and rated them as if they comp rised a corporate body. And the conclusions were more than flattering. The dabbawallahs scored a 6 Sigma performance rating, a term used in quality ass urance if the percentage of correctness is 99.999999 or more. In simple words, t his means one error in six million transactions, a benchmark reserved for blue-c hip companies like Motorola. For the humble dabbawallah, it was a treasured feat her in his Gandhi cap. But the ground realities for him will not change. His story begins every sultry Mumbai morning at 9 a.m. sharp. The doorbell rings at the Bhalekar residence in Dahisar, a far-flung suburb, in a ritual that is b eing played out simultaneously in thousands of Mumbai homes. Vrinda Bhalekar han ds over an aluminum container with piping hot lunch for her husband to a middleaged man wearing the regulation white cap.In an hour's time, the man will have c ollected 30 such dabbas (lunch boxes) to pass on to a waiting colleague at the l ocal railway station It's not easy covering so many houses quickly in a city like Mumbai. The heat an d the crawling peak-hour traffic make reaching a home a task in itself. At each stop the dabbawallah has to park his cycle at the gate, go to the client's flat which invariably means an elevator ride up a high-rise, collect the lunch and th en come down again. But it is a part of the daily grind. Just as it is for his c olleague who sweats it out in the crowded local train to reach, say, south Mumba i's Churchgate terminus by 11.30 a.m. There groups of team members effortlessly sort out the tiffin's-thousands of them in less than 10 minutes-while others pac k their carts with the boxes and dash off to the office districts. By noon, Bhalekar and thousands like him have warm food in front of them. The en tire process is reversed after the meal and Bhalekar's dabba reaches home well b efore he does. Behind this reliable-as-clockwork system is a relay of 4,500 hard working dabbawallahs and a simple but effective coding system. The residential a ddress, office address, railway stations of delivery and pick up are all crunche d into a small series of letters and numbers,hand-painted on each client's tiffi n. For instance, Bhalekar's lunch would carry the coding 3MC4, 3 for the carrier who delivers in Nariman Point, MC for his office in Mafatlal Centre and 4 for t he floor his office is located on. In another code below it, 10 is the number for the Churchgate station where the tiffin is offloaded and D for Dahisar station where it was collected. So advance d, and so loved by the people, is the service that you can order it from online grocery store webrishi.com. Despite such facilities and efficiency-a level which Forbes noted "western businesses can only aspire to"-the service comes at an am azingly cheap fee of Rs 150 a month, the price determined somewhat by the recess ion in the business. From its peak days in 1955 with deliveries of over two lakh tiffins per day, the century-old trade received its first blow when bank employ ees began leaving home early with the change in office timings in the late 1960s . The rapid closure of mills in the 1980s-'90s also robbed the dabbawallah of hi s largest clientele, the mill workers. Now, canteens and food courts in the offi ce districts have taken their toll. The money collected by the daabbawallah goes into the cooperative pool that he b

elongs to. Out of the accumulated fund, he is paid a monthly salary of Rs 3,000 or so. But no one is complaining. Raghunath Medge, president of the Nutan Mumbai Tiffin box Suppliers' Charity Trust, is undeterred. To him,all that matters is his ability to deliver. "We make a mistake perhaps once in two months. Our livel ihood depends on delivering efficiently" he says. Competition for Federal Expres s?