The Tiffin Carriers

At about half past nine in the morning, in a quiet lane in the suburbs of Mumbai, a woman hands a round steel lunch box to a man at her door. He wears a white cotton cap and a white kurta. He hangs the box on his bicycle with a dozen others and rides away.

By one o'clock, that same box will be sitting on her husband's desk in an office in the south of the city, more than twenty kilometres away. The rice will still be warm enough to enjoy. In the afternoon the empty box will travel all the way back, and be at her door again before evening.

Nobody wrote an address on it. There is no computer, no app and no tracking number. There are only a few painted marks on the lid, and the men who carry it.

Lunch from home

The men are called dabbawalas: from dabba, a box, and wala, the one who handles it. They carry tiffin, the home-cooked midday meal that millions of Indian office workers prefer to anything bought outside.

According to the dabbawalas' own history, the service began in 1890, when a man named Mahadeo Havaji Bachche started delivering lunches to office workers in what was then Bombay, with about a hundred men. The city was growing fast. Workers travelled long distances by train, too early in the morning for a hot meal to be ready, and food from home was cheaper, and familiar.

Over the next century the work grew with the city. Today, by the most often quoted figures, about five thousand dabbawalas carry some two hundred thousand lunch boxes every working day.

A code painted on a lid

The secret, if it is one, is a simple code.

On the lid of each box are a few marks painted in colours, letters and numbers. One mark shows the area where the box was collected. Another shows the railway station where it must be taken off the train. Others show the building and the floor where it is going. A dabbawala who has never read a map can read a lid at a glance.

Many dabbawalas had little formal schooling. The code was designed so that it did not matter. It asks a man to recognise a colour and a number, and to know his own part of the city better than anyone.

Hand to hand to hand

A single box changes hands several times on its journey.

The first man collects it from the home and rides to the nearest railway station. There, on the platform, the boxes from many homes are laid out on the ground and sorted by their marks into long wooden crates, each crate bound for one destination station. The crates go into the luggage space of the suburban trains, which the dabbawalas have used for generations.

At the other end, another team lifts the crates off, sorts the boxes again by building and floor, and carries them the last stretch: on bicycles, on handcarts, or on their heads, through some of the most crowded streets in the world. A local train in Mumbai waits for no one, so every step has to happen on time.

In the afternoon the whole journey runs in reverse.

The men in white caps

Most dabbawalas come from farming families in the villages around Pune, in Maharashtra. Many belong to the Warkari tradition, devoted to the god Vitthal of Pandharpur, and their white caps and simple dress are part of that heritage.

They work in small groups of twenty or so, and each group largely runs itself. The carriers are organised in a trust and an association rather than as employees of one company, and members share in the earnings of their group. Above everything else, each man is expected to be on time.

Business writers have often repeated a claim, first reported in the late 1990s, that the dabbawalas make about one mistake in several million deliveries. The figure is hard to check, and some researchers treat it with caution. But those who have followed the carriers closely agree that a lost lunch is a rare thing, and that the men themselves take it very personally.

A lesson the world came to study

In the decades since, professors, managers and journalists from around the world have travelled to Mumbai to watch the dabbawalas work. They have been written about in business schools and invited to speak to companies. In 2003, when Prince Charles visited Mumbai and wanted to meet them, he met them at a railway station in the middle of their working day, so as not to delay any lunches.

The dabbawalas themselves have never made much of the fuss. Their work is the same as it was: a box, a code, a train and a promise. Some mornings it rains so hard that the streets flood. Some days the trains are packed beyond belief. The boxes still go out, and they still come home.

Perhaps the real wonder is not the code at all. It is that thousands of ordinary people, every single day, decide that someone else's lunch matters as much as their own.

Want to read more?

Sara Roncaglia's Feeding the City, which can be read free online from its publisher, is a careful study of the dabbawalas' work, their villages and their faith. Stefan Thomke's article in the Harvard Business Review looks at how their system runs with so few mistakes.