• The tour operates only from Monday to Saturday (you will not see Dabbawalas on Sunday).

• Meet The Dabbawalas of Mumbai! For anyone who has ever been to Mumbai, the Dabbawalas are a special class of people everyone knows! Well, who is a Dabbawala? The word “dabbawala” in Hindi, when translated, means “one who carries a box”. “Dabba” means a box (usually a cylindrical tin or aluminium container). The closest meaning of the dabbawala in English would be the “lunch box delivery man.” Each day throughout Mumbai, 5,000 dabbawalas deliver some 130,000 dabbas. In the nearly 120 years of this service, the dabbawalas’ approach has remained consistent: a semi-literate workforce (the dabbawalas) picks up the filled dabbas from the households that prepare them and deliver the boxes to the requisite offices. They then retrieve the empty dabbas from these delivery points and return them to the originating households to begin the process again the next day. Roughly 260,000 transactions are completed within 6 hours each day, 6 days a week, 51 weeks a year, and operating at a quality level comparable to Six Sigma processes. Moreover, this operational excellence is accomplished without technology, such as computers or cell phones.  Stories, like the remarkable one that the Dabbawalas have, inspire teams to relook at their paradigms with fresh new eyes.

Churchgate, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India