Mumbai is a very densely populated city of millions with huge flows of traffic. Instead of going home for lunch or paying for a meal in a café, many office have cooked meal sent either from their home, or sometimes from a caterer who essentially cooks and delivers the meal in lunch boxes and then empty lunch boxes collected and re-se nt the same day. 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.
The dabawallah then takes them to a designated sorting place, where he and othe collecting dabbawalas sort the lunch boxes into groups. The grouped boxes are put s, with markings to identify the destination of the box (usually ther is a designated car for the boxes). The markings include the rail station to unload boxes and the building address where the box has to be delivered.
Economic analysis :
Each dabbawallha, regardless of role, gets paid about two to four thousand rupecs per month. In 2002, Forbes Magazine found its reliability to be that of a six sigma standard. More than 175,000 to 200,000 lunch boxes get moved every day by an estimated 4,5 5,000 dabbavalas, 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.