The closest meaning of the dabbawala in English would be the “lunch box delivery man”. Meet the ''real heroes'' - Dabbawalas of Mumbai on this guided tour. Each day throughout the city of Mumbai, 5,000 of the dabbawalas deliver some 130,000 dabbas to offices throughout the metropolis. 

In the nearly 120 years of this service, the dabbawalas’ approach has remained consistent: a semi-literate workforce (the dabbawalas) pick 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 in the absence of technology, such as computers or even cell phones.  

Remarkable stories of these Dabbawalas inspire teams to relook at their own paradigms with fresh new eyes.