Your lunch is a click away: Mumbai’s dabbawalas take their service online

Now, office-goers in Mumbai can get the services of the city’s famed dabbawalas online. The Mumbai Dabawala’s Association on Monday started their own official website, where people can register themselves to avail of their services.

On its website, www.dabewale.com, the association has put up details about their work, history and achievements, apart from a section where customers can list themselves to get their lunch delivered at their workplace. A report about the website was published recently in the Marathi newspaper Loksatta.

According to the report, the association plans to put up contact details of dabbawalas on the website so that people can contact them directly. The attempt, clearly, is to connect better to an upwardly mobile, internet-savvy population.

Speaking to Firstpost, Subhash Talekar, the general secretary of the association, said, “With the government in Delhi starting the Digital India initiative, we thought of taking cue and connecting with people on the internet. This is an attempt to reduce the distance between the service and the customer by using modern technology.

For 125 years, the dabbawalas have been delivering lunch boxes  with an efficiency which has achieved worldwide acclaim. In 2001, Forbes magazine had awarded a six sigma certification to the service with an accuracy rate so high that there is said to be only one error for every 16 million transactions. According to this article in the Economist , Harvard Business School has also made a case study of the system, urging its students to take lessons in management from them.

While narrating the story of its origin, the website says- “In 1890, a Parsi banker working in Fort branch employed a young man who had come down from Girgaon to fetch his lunch every afternoon. The charges were approximately 2 annas. Business picked up through referrals and soon the pioneer tiffin – carrying entrepreneur had to call for more helping hands from his village. The idea caught on and this inspired many people to become dabba carriers.”

The association, on its website, points out that they achieved their worldwide reputation for efficiency and dependability without much technology backup, and that they now have a turnover  of Rs 40-45 crore.