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Mumbai: Thousands of office goers in Mumbai, who have their home-cooked food delivered by the city's famed dabbawallahs, the tiffin carriers, also found a piece of advice on countering Aids, along with food this time.
The extra something came in the form of an 'Aids Kit' - comprising a car calendar with fliers on testing and counselling tied neatly with a red ribbon. These were distributed on Friday ahead of the World Aids Day on Sunday.
These kits were attached to empty lunch boxes and delivered to about 100,000 clients' homes.
"We are spreading Aids awareness at homes and offices as well," said Gajanan Telekar, a tiffin carrier.
Some 5,000 dabbawallahs deliver 200,000 meals from their clients' homes all over Mumbai to their workplaces every day.
The dabbawallah system has been studied in top international business schools as a model of efficiency.
Prerna Kumar, a consultant at Johns Hopkins University, said: "There is an army of 5,000 dabbawallas, which goes across the city and they not deliver just dabbas [tiffin boxes] to the work places but take them back to their homes as well. They have roughly two lakh customers."
The dabbawallahs collect lunch-boxes from homes, sort them out using colour-and-alphabet code, travel by suburban trains, and even carry on their heads heavy wooden trays holding up to 35 boxes for delivery at offices.
High efficiency
Their error margin is said to be one in six million deliveries. Health groups sought the dabbawallahs help for anti-Aids campaign to be able to use their delivery mechanism.
"It started as a workplace intervention, but we realised the messages are not trickling back to their families. So, this time they are taking the message back to their homes with the empty boxes," said Prerna.
Door-to-door service: 120-year-old institution
A dabbawala (one who carries the box) is a person in Mumbai whose job is to carry and deliver freshly made food from home in lunch boxes (dabba) to office workers. For efficiency of their supply chain they are awarded Six Sigma performance rating by Forbes.
More than 175,000 to 200,000 lunches get moved every day by an estimated 4,500 to 5,000 dabbawalas, all with an extremely small nominal fee and with utmost punctuality. According to a recent survey, there is only one mistake in every 6,000,000 deliveries.
The Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Association is a streamlined 120-year-old organisation providing a quality door-to-door service to a large and loyal customer base. A twin process combines competitive collaboration between team members with a high level of technical efficiency in logistics management.
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