In India, lunch survives globalization
MUMBAI: Gaurav Bamania, a hedge fund analyst who works in one of the many downtown office towers that dominate the skyline of Indias financial capital, could easily eat lunch at one of the better restaurants here. Instead, Bamania, 26, follows a practice dating back more than a century: He has a hot meal, lovingly cooked at home by his grandmother and delivered to his desk every workday.
In India, where many traditions are being rapidly overturned by globalization, the practice of eating a home-cooked meal for lunch lives on.
To achieve that in this sprawling urban amalgamation of an estimated 25 million people, where long commutes by train and bus are routine, residents rely on an intricately organized, labor-intensive operation that puts some automated high-tech systems to shame. It manages to deliver tens of thousands of meals to workplaces all over the city with near-clockwork precision.
At the heart of this unusual network is a chain of delivery men called dabbawallas. The word comes from tiffin dabba, a colonial reference to a box containing a light meal, and walla, the man who carries. The precision and efficiency of the dabbawallas has been likened to the Internet, where packets identified by unique markers are ferried to their destination via a complex network.
“There is a service called FedEx that is similar to ours, but they dont deliver lunch,” said one dabbawalla, Dhondu Kondaji Chowdhury.
The British introduced the service 125 years ago after the city was flooded by workers from different regions. The dabbawallas made it possible for workers to bridge the distance between work and home and between different regional food variations.
The service has until recently thrived purely on word of mouth. But it is now getting a high-tech lift, as the dabbawallas have joined up with Web service providers. An office worker, with someone lined up at home to cook, can sign up for the service through text messaging or e-mail.
In the urban sprawl of Mumbai, the dabbawalla system has withstood the onslaught of office cafeterias, neighborhood eateries, multinational food chains and expensive restaurants, where reservations are hard to come by. The dabbawallas deliver even in the pouring rain or during political strife. And business is still growing, at a steady rate of 5 percent to 10 percent a year.
A network of wallas picks up the boxes from customers homes or from people who cook lunches to order, then delivers the meals to a local railroad station. The boxes are sorted for delivery to various stations in Mumbai and then sorted again and carried to their destinations. The service reverses after lunch, and the empty boxes are delivered back home.
The secret of the system is in the colored codes painted on the side of the boxes, which tell the dabbawallas where the food comes from and which railroad stations it must pass through on its way to a specific office in a specific building in Mumbai.
“We dont know how we could survive without this system,” said Vrinda Chiplunkar, who prepares lunches of lentils, vegetables, rice, chapatis and salad for her husband, Chandrashekhar Chiplunkar, who runs the foreign exchange division of Oman International Bank. “The old-fashioned, inexpensive dabbawalla system is a rare survivor in this fast-paced world.”
The Chiplunkars are loyal customers of the 64-year-old Chowdhury. Like many dabbawallas, Chowdhury is a migrant from a rural village in the region. He is illiterate but has learned on the job to read the numbers and letters painted on the lunch boxes and to sign his name to customer receipts.
“This is the best profession for somebody like me in Mumbai,” Chowdhury said. With the 5,000 rupees, about $125, he earns every month, he manages to support his wife, son and daughter in a two-room home in Goregaon, a distant suburb. Chowdhury said he dreams of sending his son, a ninth-grade student, to college.
There is no dearth of dabbawallas as younger men stream into the city from the vicinity of Chowdhurys native village.
For Suresh Shivekar, who hauls lunch boxes on a train from Versova to Colaba, the workday starts at 8:30 a.m. He transports the boxes by bicycle and arrives at the train station not long afterward. The boxes are sorted there and loaded on to a large wooden crate, which Shivekar heaves onto the train. On a regular day, the luggage compartment at the front of the train is a sea of color-coded lunch boxes.
The reliability of the dabbawalla system pays off with loyal customers. Anand Sahasrebuddhe, 46, who works in the Churchgate offices of ACC, one of Indias largest cement and concrete makers, has been depending on them for 26 years.
