Dabbawalas

Lot of things comes to our mind when we think about Mumbai... movies, celebrities, Sachin, and ofcourse then Dabbawalas.  Those who got married might know the difficulties and hurrie-burries the morning gets on, due to the food preparation that is to be done for breakfast and lunch.  Nowadays in most of the families, both husband and wife are working.  So,  they got to cook and get themselves ready in time also.  If they have kids, then the burden is too much.  But, Mumbaikars, have their comfort in the form of "Dabbawalas". 

Dabbawalas need to no introduction.  They are a part of a well organized organization who handle the transportation of homecooked food (lunchboxes-colorcoded for destination/owner) to 200,000 working mumbaikars. 

Their efficiency is so high that they got the six sigma award, as their error rate is only 1 in 16 million transactions. All of them belong to the same community - 'Maratha' - and came from some 7-8 villages near Pune. Most of them are having agricultural lands as their primary occupation. Although these people were not having any training in supply chain management, but still their commitment and zeal made sure that Mumbai dabbawala kept on increasing its customer base and won hearts of his loyal customers.
I got shocked to know about their commitment, even during the flood, bomb blast, not a single dabba was delayed or missed!!!

I came across this site which I think is the official website for dabbawalas: http://www.mydabbawala.com/
A short video on Dabbawalas (sorry, I could not embed it here) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfzdqwOnW_8:

Some pictures: