Pure Gharguti

While the rest of the city is stuck in traffic, arguing on local trains and desperately searching for an auto, a quiet army of men in white kurtas and Gandhi caps is already working. They are not tech workers. They do not have funding. They have never pitched on Shark Tank. They have a bicycle, a wooden crate, and a system so remarkable that Harvard Business School flew all the way to Mumbai just t o study it. Meet the dabbawalas. And once you understand what they actually do, you will never look at your lunch the same way again. Who Are These Men and What Do They Actually Do The word dabbawala is beautifully simple. Dabba means box. Wala means the person who does something. So a dabbawala is simply the person who carries the box. But that simple description does not come close to capturing the scale of what happens every single day. Around 5,000 dabbawalas collect approximately 200,000 freshly prepared lunch boxes from homes across Mumbai, deliver them to the right office, to t...