![]() The sigma rating was the same as that given to the top bluechip company Motorola - not bad considering that most dabba-wallahs are illiterate. It is a rare day indeed when a customer's deep-fried rotis fail to turn up. This error rate means in effect that a tiffin goes astray only once every two months. In other words, for every six million tiffins delivered, only one fails to arrive. And it recently won international acclaim from an unlikely source, the normally arid American business magazine Forbes.įorbes awarded the humble dabba-wallahs a 6 Sigma performance rating, a term used in quality assurance if the percentage of correctness is 99.9999999 or more. The system owes much to the innate Indian genius for mathematics (it was an ancient Indian mathematician who invented the concept of zero). The ritual is then played out in reverse: once the tiffins have been eaten, the same empty metal containers are escorted back to where they came from. Here, the dabba-wallahs deliver them by 12.45pm sharp to hungry office workers. The lunches then travel southwards into the centre of Bombay. There, they sort them out by destination on the platform. They take the tiffins to suburban railway stations. Parking their bicycles outside a succession of middle-class tower blocks, they collect up to 160,000 home-cooked lunches. This morning, as ever, Lahu is playing a small but vital role in what must surely be the world's most ingenious meal distribution system.Įvery day, like the subaltern heroes in a James Joyce novel, some 4,000 tiffin-wallahs or packed lunch boys set off across Bombay's far-flung and verdant outer suburbs. But within seconds we have lost Lahu: he has vanished through a scrum of auto-rickshaws past a derelict pavement piled high with rubbish and empty coconut shells beyond the double-decker red buses and is half way towards Mrs Gavai's son's school while we wait at a traffic light. We try to follow in a black and yellow taxi. He then sets off at Chris Boardman-like speed across Colaba, Bombay's genteel neo-Gothic central district. Lahu collects the packed lunch, legs it down three flights of stairs, and attaches the tiffin bag to his Hercules bicycle. It is Lahu, Mrs Gavai's ever-reliable tiffin or dabba-wallah. A young man wearing pyjama-style trousers and shirt steps inside. With impeccable timing, the doorbell rings. Her eight-year-old son's tiffin - as a packed lunch is still known across the Indian subcontinent, more than half a century after the demise of the Raj - is ready. She puts the two pots into a small pink lunchbox. ![]() It's got red chilli in it, as well as ginger, garlic and masala powder. She then turns to the chana bhatura, or deep-fried chick peas, bubbling away on the back of her stove. ![]() ![]() Mrs Gavai, meanwhile, spoons the pasta with vegetables into a small aluminium pot. ![]()
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