I would like to share and something NON IT here.

Which has been studied by many big business school like Harvard, THE DABBAWALAS, of Mumbai.


A dabbawala meaning person with a box, found in Mumbai, who is employed in a unique service industry whose primary business is collecting the freshly cooked food in lunch boxes from the residences of the office worker, delivering it to their respective workplaces and returning the empty boxes back to the customer’s residence by using various modes of transport.
 In 1890, Mahadeo Havaji Bachche, started a lunch delivery service with about 100 men, now there are around 5000 men working.

Mumbai is a very densely populated city of millions with huge flows of traffic. Because of this, lengthy commutes to workplaces are common, with many workers traveling by train.
Instead of going home for lunch or paying for a meal in a cafe, many office workers have a cooked meal sent either from their home, or sometimes from a caterer who essentially cooks and delivers the meal in lunch boxes and then have the empty lunch boxes collected and re-sent the same day. This is usually done for a monthly fee. The meal is cooked in the morning and sent in lunch boxes carried by dabbawalas, who have a complex association and hierarchy across the city.

A collecting dabbawala, usually on bicycle, collects dabbas either from a worker’s home or from the dabba makers. The dabbas have some sort of distinguishing mark on them, such as a color or symbol.
The dabbawala then takes them to a designated sorting place, where he and other collecting dabbawalas sort (and sometimes bundle) the lunch boxes into groups. The grouped boxes are put in the coaches of trains, with markings to identify the destination of the box. The markings include the rail station to unload the boxes and the building address where the box has to be delivered.
At each station, boxes are handed over to a local dabbawala, who delivers them. The empty boxes, after lunch, are again collected and sent back to the respective houses.

The service is almost always uninterrupted, even on the days of severe weather such as monsoon. In 2002, Forbes Magazine found its reliability to be that of a Six Sigma standard. 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. According to a recent survey, they make less than one mistake in every 6 million deliveries, despite most of the delivery staff being illiterate.

The BBC has produced a documentary on dabbawalas, and Prince Charles, during his visit to India, visited them. Prince Charles also invited them to his wedding with Camilla Parker Bowles in London on 9 April 2005. Owing to the tremendous publicity, some of the dabbawalas were invited to give guest lectures in some of the top business schools of India, which is very unusual. Most remarkably in the eyes of many Westerners, the success of the dabbawala trade has involved no advanced technology, except for trains. The New York times reported in 2007 that the 125-year-old dabbawala industry continues to grow at a rate of 5–10% per year.

To read more about them, please visit http://mumbaidabbawala.org/index.html