CASE STUDY- The Dabbawalas of

Mumbai

MPOB-PGDM 2020

Priya Chauhan
ABS/PGDM/20/031

The dabbawalas of Mumbai carry hot lunches from the homes of employees (customers)
to their
Places of employment. the aluminum containers, known as dabbas or 'tiffins', server the
dual purpose of keeping the food warm and preventing it from splashing. Out during the
tiffin carrier's rushing and jostling journey. A typical tiffin carrier carries about 40 of
these dabbas on a long, unwieldy tray on his head as he moves speedily through busy
streets and cramped trains. The tray and tiffin have a combined weight of more than 60
kg. For distances over 4 kg, the carriers often use bicycles; when carrying more than
40tiffins, the carriers use handcarts.
Each dabbawala is employed by one of the city’s 800 mukaddams (contractors). the
contractors and tiffin carriers both belong to the Mumbai Tiffin Box Carriers Association.
It was registered as a trust in 1967, but was an informal guild for some 50 years before
this.
There are two primary reasons why the tiffin carrier operations started and succeeded
in Mumbai. First, the Indian value system places great emphasis on home-cooked meals,
served hot. The problem for roughly eight out of ten white-collar workers in Mumbai is
that do not have time to go home for lunch. The tiffin carrier brings the security of an
inexpensive, clean, tasty, and often still-warm, home -cooked meal. Restaurant meals cost
five to fifteen times more than home-cooked food and there is also the chance of falling
ill, as many public eateries lack hygienic kitchens.
Second, Mumbai is the only city in India where the train traffic flows in the north-
south direction and the pedestrian traffic flows in the east-west direction. thus, tiffins are
physically carried for relatively short distances from homes to train stations by one set of
tiffin carriers, carried by train for longer distances between stations, and finally carried by
other tiffin carriers from the train stations to the designated workplaces. Therefore,
Mumbai alone can sustain a tiffin carrier network of this size and complexity because of
its quick, efficient, and far-reaching suburban train service.
THE ASSOCIATION

Most of Mumbai’s tiffin carriers and contractors come from the Pune region, roughly
150 miles away from Mumbai. A tiffin carriers does not have to pay the contractor to be
hired. There is absolutely no paperwork involved. Trust and loyalty are the main
underpinnings of recruitment. Typically, no formal training is provided to the tiffin carrier
upon being hired. However, for the first 2 days, the tiffin carrier follows his contractor or
another dabbawala who shows the new recruit his route, the homes/apartments he would
visit to pick up tiffin in the morning and to which he would return tiffin in the afternoon,
and explains the coding/identification system. A tiffin carrier will visit up to 40 homes
each day and he must learn the location of all of them during his 2-day orientation. All
the training is done orally.

The contractors basically run the business through two committees: the Mandal
committee and the Trust committee. The members of the Mandal committee are 11
elected contractors, each elected for 5 years. This committee collectively governs the
Trust but its primary responsibilities seem to be dealing with brokering conflicts among
contractors and addressing potential contractors. The Trust committee, comprising 11
elected contractors, each elected for a 5-year period, is responsible for the operation of
the dharamshalas (courtesy inns) back home in Pune. In addition, two contractors serve
as staff to the Trust. The job of these two contractors includes (1) resolving disputes and
problems arising in day-to-day operations that cannot be resolved by contractors and their
groups, (2) enrolling new customers into the business, and (3) arranging and calling
meeting of the Trust. The contractors, in turn, are responsible to The Mumbai Tiffinbox
carriers Association. The Mandal or 'circle'(i.e., the association) organizes monthly
business meetings. All contractors are required to attend the mandal's monthly meetings.
the tiffin carriers can also attend the monthly meetings if they so desire. The Mandal
committee sorts out the internal problems/disputes between the contractors at these
business meetings. Additionally, the tiffin carriers and contractors meet socially once a
month. These meetings are organized by the Trust.

Structure
Some of the salient points of the Trust in terms of structural dimensions are:

Standards In the Trust, the work appears to involve output standardisation, because
workers are given explicit work goal (e.g., tiffin to retrieve each morning). If goals do not
change and each person completes his task, this is an important coordination mechanism.
Moreover, it appears that workers share beliefs about what is acceptable behaviour
and what is not. This implies that output standardisation is supplemented by norm
standardisation. The latter is encouraged by the tiffin carriers' functional unit grouping. In
a functional unit grouping, everyone within a specific work group has similar tasks to
perform.

Hierarchy There is a relatively flat hierarchy of authority. There are only three levels
within the organization: some 5,000 workers, called carriers; some 800 supervisors or
managers, called contractors; and the 11-member Mandal committee. A flat organization
such as this often implies a wide span of control. By contrast, here each manager
manages a group four to ten employees. By western standards, the span of control is
narrow. However, we believe that this reflects an aspect of Indian culture-specifically, the
tendency to have many supervisiors in an Indian organization.

Specialization There is a relatively high degree of specialistion. There are a limited

number of different jobs and each involves a relatively narrow range of tasks. The jobs
correspond to the work: the pick-up of filled tiffin from and return of empty tiffin to
homes; train transportation of tiffin between residential and commercial districts; and the
delivery of tiffins to and pick-up of tiffin from receivers (workers). A consequence of
high specialisation is increased task interdependence, hence the need for coordination
mechanisms, such as standardisation, to accomplish end results.

Complexity Vertical complexity is low because the organization is flat; horizontal

complexity is low because there are a limited number of different jobs in the
organization; geographical complexity is low because the organization is at one site only.

Staff Professionalism is also low. There is very little formal education or employee
training required for the work of contractors or carriers. As for personnel ratios, the
administrative ratio low, perhaps zero. There are only two line members (contractors)
who have, as their additional responsibility, the completion of the staff functions of the
organization.
 b
Contextual Dimensions
There are four contextual dimensions-- organizational size, organizational technology,
external environment, and goals and strategies. Some of the salient features of the Trust
in these areas are:

Organizational size The Trust has some 5,800 members, making it a large-scale
operation.

Organizational technology The technical complexity is low, as the Trust's

organizational technology is labour intensive (uniform inputs, pre-coded inputs, and few
exceptions). Technical uncertainty is also low (variability in tiffin is low) the principal
form of technical system interdependence is sequential interdependence across the phases
of work (mentioned earlier) and with pooled interdependence within phases. This specific
form of organizational technology is associated with low structural complexity and output
standardisation as an effective coordination mechanism, both of which we have observed.

External environment The external environment is regarded as relatively stable by the

Trust even though there are competitors in their task environment that are cutting into
their business. Customers are the primary focus and they are satisfied with the service
they are receiving. Nevertheless, consistent with our description of changing values
towards meals, the customer base is shrinking because street vendors and restaurants
offer active competition.

Goals and strategies Although strategies and goals are a central concern of
organizations, the only stated goal we gathered from interviews with contractors and
tiffin carriers was to continually provide this service in the best possible manner. the lack
of strategic interest is even reflected is even reflected in their passive approach towards
threats to the very survival of their business.

A TYPICAL JOURNEY

To understand how the exchange and delivery of food take place (in other words, the
activities involved in the supply chain), one of the co-authors accompanied the tiffin
carriers on their daily routes. Before describing the process in detail, we will present an
overview. The process has three phases: the pick-up of the tiffin and its delivery to a train
station, the train transportation of the tiffin to its final destination, and the delivery of the
tiffin to the customer. This process occurs twice daily: from home to office and the
Tiffin’s return from office to home.
we will now describe a typical journey by following the tiffin of Raj Ramaswamy, a
fictional accountant, on its daily trip from his home to office and back.

Step 1 Raj's tiffin carrier, who we call tiffin carrier 1, knocks at approximately 10 a.m. on
Ramaswamy's door. He is not wearing a watch. He quickly gets the tiffin from Mrs.
Ramaswamy and sprints down the stairs. his daily route covers 38 apartments (38 tiffin)
spread over a 2-mile radius. Each tiffin has a different symbol as each is bound for a
different destination.

Step 2 At approximately 10:30 a.m., Raj's tiffin with yellow characters. As tiffin carrier 2
pedals off to a nearby train station with his collected tiffins, tiffin carrier 1 continues to to
go from apartment to get lunch boxes that will soon be collected by other carriers.

Step 3 At the railway station, different collectors have deposited hundreds of tiffins.
From them, tiffin carrier 3 quickly removes all of those with a red dot, Raj's included. He
loads his consignment on a 'tray', a wooden crate 2.5 m long. A typical tray loaded with
40 tiffin has a total weight of more than 60 kg. The carrier puts the tray on his head and
runs to the platform just as the train rolls in. Raj's tiffin is now one of thousands riding
this train into the city. Different characters on the tiffins tell the carrier at which stations
en route they must pass on specific tiffins to other
Waiting carriers. The yellow alphanumeric character and the red dot on Raj's tiffin tell the
carrier its destination is churchgate station, the hub of commercial Mumbai.

Step 4 At churchgate station, Raj's tiffin enters the last phase of its journey. Tiffin carrier
4, waiting on the platform, picks it out together with other lunch boxes marked with
similar characters. The second and third characters of the symbol indicate its exact
destination: the Express Towers building at Nariman point. By 12:30 p.m., the carrier has
carried his tray up four flights of stairs and left Raj’s lunch box, along with the others,
outside the customers’ offices.
At 2 p.m. the morning delivery service tracks down the above steps in reverse,
using exactly the same symbols that moved the tiffin forward previously. Tiffin carrier 1,
now at the receiving end of the line, brings Raj’s tiffin back to his wife at 4 p.m., guided
to her house by the last character of the symbol. Of course, the exact location of the
house is part of the memory database of tiffin carrier 1.
Logistics perspective
The logistics systems that have an exact one-to-one correspondence with the tiffin carrier
system of Mumbai are the mail and parcel delivery systems in the United States of
America and other countries. These systems have unique customer-supplier pairings for
each delivery. Postal or parcel delivery systems are typically modelled as hub-and-spoke
systems. Here, all letters/
Parcels are first flown to a hub and then flown to their destination from the hub. These
are multi-billion-dollar systems that employ the latest technology for receiving and
tracking deliverables. Major efficiencies are supposedly obtained through the hub-and-
spoke structure of the logistical system. Despite large capital investments, highly
sophisticated technologies, mature postal systems (zip codes and all), and other well-
established identifications, these systems yield low delivery reliability and are unable to
individualize operations. In contrast, the tiffin carrier system of India invests pennies,
uses a very crude identification system, uses virtually no technology, and relies mainly on
untrained, grossly under-education (if not illiterate) personnel to obtain great delivery
reliability and customer satisfaction.
The tiffin carrier system is a conjoined structure that falls squarely under
arborescent systems. It involves the transfer of some 200,000 lunch boxes, collected
every day from an equal number of sources, and delivered to some 80,000 destinations
the same day within a time window of 3 hours. The error rate of this system is
remarkably low (less than 1 per cent) and it accomplishes its goals at the rate of pennies
per customer per day. In the US, large logistical systems that involve material transfer of
the order of the lunch carrier system are generally reduced to a hub-and-spoke structure
(e.g., Federal Express, American Airlines) to gain efficiencies of time. They are also
supported by state-of-the-art technologies, including computerized decision-making that
exploits artificial intelligence and a very sophisticated telecommunication system. Their
operating costs are typically in millions of dollars. By contrast and as noted, the tiffin
carrier system uses virtually no technology (other than the trains and bicycles), is limited
to face-to-face communication, employs virtually no computers, and is about as informal
as a system this size can be. What is particularly notable is the coding system to identify
lunch boxes: it consists of just three to four symbols. Moreover, on-the-job training of
operators is often accomplished within 2 days, which includes learning the delivery
process and the specific locations of some 40 dwelling units of customers. Yet, it registers
an outstanding performance on both counts--- cost and reliability of delivery. That is, it
operates literally at pennies a day per customer. It operates at a remarkably low error rate
of less than 1 per cent, where errors include not only non-delivery within the time
window, but also loss and breakage of lunch boxes. The tiffin carriers’ error rate
compares favourably with the error rate of lost suitcases at various airlines.

Conclusions
Our case study of business supports two important principles. First, culture affects
organizational from and functioning, human resource management, and the development
of logistical systems; that is, it can result in systems that are not fully ‘western’ in from
and functioning. This leads to the second principle---- a labour-intensive, technologically
unsophisticated logistical system can be as efficient and as effective as a technologically
sophisticated (western) logistical system of the same design. The tiffin carrier are
unsophisticated counterparts of such sophisticated courier services as Federal Express
and United parcel Service, all of which are conjoined logistical system, i.e., where
material is transferred from multiple sources to multiple destinations. We found that an
organizational and logistical system that fits its cultural and geographic ‘niche’ can
survive and, more importantly, prosper. And, in special cases where employee dedication
results from family values, as is the case with the tiffin carrier system studied here, the
performance could well be stunning?
 Questions for discussion

1. What are the main learnings from the case?

Ans. 1 The main learning I find in this case is how and why this tiffin carrying
service has been very successful in Mumbai.

Some of the learnings are from the case:

i. How can HR management is being used in this field.
ii. How the food is being delivered in this tiffin services, as well as the other
services which are involved in this service.
iii. Understanding the logistical system that can survive due to culture of
various places.
iv. Hierarchy used by the dabbawallas and their delivering services
v. About NMTBSA? Nutan Mumbai Tiffin box Supplier Association.

2. What team and inter-team processes are reflected in the operation

of the dabbawala system?

Ans. 2 There is a trust between the employees and the contractor which is the main
thing in this whole system.
There are 2 commitees:
 The mandal committee
 The trust committee
The inter team process is between the carrier and the delivery address:
 Carrier will pickup tiffin @10 am label the essential about where it is to be
reached.
 Special carriers are those who take up area wise service.
 All the tiffin are taken to the railway station where another carrier arrange
them and puts them on a 2.5m long wooden cart carrying upto 40 tiffin at
a time.
 After that he reaches the destination where another carrier collects them at
different places.
 The carrier who will pick up the tiffin will deliver them to the office of the
customer.
 The tiffins are collected later and the same chain will be repeated again
but backward.

3. Which behavioral sciences are relevant for understanding the

dynamics of the dabbawala system?
Ans. 3 Behavioral sciences that are relevant for understanding the dynamics of
dabbawala system are:
 PSYCHOLOGY: Although all the workers are not educated, their main
motto is same i.e. customer satisfaction the trust and the behavioral
science is the reason why the dabbawalas are successful in their work.
 SOCIOLOGY: This behavioral science is depicted in the management
and time management and the punctuality that dabbawalas have. The way
they carry out all the work given is all through simple communication and
labels that are stick to the tiffin’s. the trust and the punctuality are the
reasons for the success of dabbawalas