4-Hour Mumbai Local Train Tour with Dabbawalas and Dhobi Ghat

Meet the Dabbawalas of Mumbai! For anyone who has ever been to Mumbai, the dabbawalas are a special class of people everyone knows. But who is a dabbawala? The word "dabbawala" in Hindi means "one who carries a box." "Dabba" means a box, usually a cylindrical tin or aluminium container. The closest meaning in English would be "lunch box delivery man." Each day throughout Mumbai, 5,000 dabbawalas deliver around 130,000 dabbas. In the nearly 120 years of this service, the dabbawalas' approach has remained consistent: a semi-literate workforce picks up filled dabbas from the households that prepare them and delivers the boxes to the required 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, 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 the dabbawalas have inspire teams to relook at their paradigms with fresh new eyes.