Dabbawalas don’t want to service other cities

BANGALORE: Techies in Bangalore want dabbawalas to deliver them homemade food, so do people in Delhi, Ahmedabad, Pune and Chennai.

Mumbai’s dabbawalas are being deluged with offers from these cities to launch their acclaimed six-sigma supply chain. But there are problems.

“We can start a similar service in other cities only if we have as many customers as in Mumbai,” Raghunath D Medge, president of Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Supply Charity, told DNA.

Nearly 5,000 dabbawalas, wearing white pajamas and Gandhi topis, pick up and deliver lunch boxes to some two lakh Mumbaikars every day with clocklike precision and clinical efficiency that have earned them laurels from B-schools and management gurus worldwide.

Medge says he received at least 10 requests from each city mentioned above in the recent past. “Even I have asked him to start the service,” said Chetan Bajaj, director of Bangalore’s International School of Business and Media, where Medge made a presentation on the phenomenon on Wednesday.

But Medge lists out many hurdles for venturing into other cities. “The first problem,” he laments with a sigh, “is the (lack of proper) public transportation. We are low-cost service-providers and any other means of transportation won’t be cost-efficient.”

The tiffin-carriers use no modern technology and travel up to 70 km each in not more than three hours by train or bicycle or both. “We are also afraid we won’t be able to run our business in Mumbai so efficiently if we divert our attention elsewhere,” adds Gangaram L Talekar, secretary of the dabawallas’ trust.