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The Dabbawalas

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The Dabbawalas of Mumbai*
Ashok Kumar, Stephen T. Margulis, and jaideep Motwani

The dabbawalas of Mumbai carry hot lunches from the homes of employees (customers) to their places of employment. The aluminium containers or 'tiffins' serve the dual purpose of keeping the food warm and preventing it from splashing out during the tiffin carrier's rushed 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 tiffins have a combined weight of more than 60 kg. For distances over 4 km, the carriers often use bicycles; when carrying more than 40 tiffins, the carriers use handcarts.

Each dabbawala is employed by one of the city's 800 contractors (mukaddams). The contractors and tiffin carriers both belong to the Mumbai Tiffinbox 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 they 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

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