One of the really interesting things we saw on our tour of Mumbai was the Dabbawalas (deliverers of boxed lunches). These guys run a business that connects a Mumbai office worker with his/her lunch that was prepared back in their home.
The normal course of operations here is:
1. The office worker leaves for work around 7:30am, likely getting on a train.
2. Someone in the worker's home, prepares their lunch and leaves it for the Dabbawalas
3. A Dabbawala picks up the lunch, marks it with the information of where it came from and where to deliver it.
4. The Dabbawala delivers that lunch and many others to a train, maybe around 10am. The Dabbawalas load all the dabbas (lunch boxes) on to their dedicated train car.
5. The train shipment is delivered to Mumbai and the Dabbawalas move it to their distribution points around the city, like the one shown above.
6. Each of the lunches is then moved to the appropriate delivery driver. Once the driver has all his dabbas (I still don't understand how he knows how he's got all the dabbas he's supposed to deliver - I asked, but the only answer I got was "he just knows"), he leaves the distribution point and delivers the dabbas to the office workers.
7. At the end of the day, the Dabbawalas reverse everything that they've already done, returning the empty dabbas back to the home that they originated from.
Whether it's on bikes, with carts, or on foot, these guys are working their asses off to deliver thousands of lunches, for very little money. Much like many people in India.
As a side note, it has to be said that the people who do the physical work in this country work incredibly hard and don't look like they do much complaining. Send the average North American kid here to India and they'd crumble in hours.
The normal course of operations here is:
1. The office worker leaves for work around 7:30am, likely getting on a train.
2. Someone in the worker's home, prepares their lunch and leaves it for the Dabbawalas
3. A Dabbawala picks up the lunch, marks it with the information of where it came from and where to deliver it.
4. The Dabbawala delivers that lunch and many others to a train, maybe around 10am. The Dabbawalas load all the dabbas (lunch boxes) on to their dedicated train car.
5. The train shipment is delivered to Mumbai and the Dabbawalas move it to their distribution points around the city, like the one shown above.
6. Each of the lunches is then moved to the appropriate delivery driver. Once the driver has all his dabbas (I still don't understand how he knows how he's got all the dabbas he's supposed to deliver - I asked, but the only answer I got was "he just knows"), he leaves the distribution point and delivers the dabbas to the office workers.
7. At the end of the day, the Dabbawalas reverse everything that they've already done, returning the empty dabbas back to the home that they originated from.
Whether it's on bikes, with carts, or on foot, these guys are working their asses off to deliver thousands of lunches, for very little money. Much like many people in India.
As a side note, it has to be said that the people who do the physical work in this country work incredibly hard and don't look like they do much complaining. Send the average North American kid here to India and they'd crumble in hours.
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