Dabbawala Disrupted By Covid

After the pandemic shut offices and put Mumbai’s renowned lunchbox deliverymen out of work, the 130-year-old “dabbawala” network has tied up with a trendy restaurant chain to take on India’s billion-dollar start-ups. For two decades, neither terror attacks nor monsoon deluges could stop Kailash Shinde from delivering hot lunches to Mumbai office workers, until lockdowns put dabbawala network on a forced hiatus for a whole year.

Instantly recognizable in its traditional Gandhi cap and white Indian attire, the 5,000 dabbawalas — or “lunchbox men” in Hindi - have gained global recognition for delivering home-cooked food with clockwork precision. An intricate system of alphanumeric codes helps the largely semi-literate or illiterate workforce collect, sort and distribute 200,000 meals across Mumbai each day via bicycles, hand carts and a sprawling local train network.

Their work has been studied as a “model of service excellence” at Harvard Business School, and inspired personal visits from Richard Branson, Prince Charles and executives from global delivery giants FedEx and Amazon, among others.

But with extended lockdowns forcing millions of Mumbai’s white-collar professionals to work from home, many dabbawalas have been struggling to feed their own families since April last year.

Mumbai’s original deliverymen - But delivery jobs are harder to come by in a space now increasingly dominated by mobile apps, especially for its member who can’t read or write.

Help arrived this May in the form of a tie-up with some of Mumbai’s most popular eateries, allowing members to return to work. Instead of handling home-cooked meals packed in stainless steel tiffin boxes, Member is now delivering restaurant staples from nachos to spaghetti carbonara to time-starved professionals as they continue working from home for a second year.

The scheme offers restaurateurs an alternative to the prevailing local duopoly of delivery giants Zomato and Swiggy, whose steep discounts and razor-thin margins have slashed their profits.

A new beginning - Restaurants plan to expand his partnership with the dabbawalas, but analysts say that alone may not be enough to help the famed deliverymen survive the pandemic. The dabbawalas could become delivery agents for last-mile delivery not just for restaurants but also for any e-commerce business.

But a lack of literacy means many of them are reluctant to take on work that requires tech-savvy skills.