Mumbai's famed dabbawalas fed millions for over 100 years - now they are disappearing

52 minutes ago

Every morning, before the city has fully woken up, men in white caps and shirts arrive at Mumbai's suburban railway stations on bicycles stacked high with lunchboxes.

They load these boxes onto trains, cross the city and then spread out on foot and bikes to deliver hot, home-cooked meals to office workers.

After a short break, they do it all in reverse - collecting the empty boxes and returning them to the kitchens they came from by mid-afternoon.

These men are called dabbawalas and for more than a century they have kept Mumbai fed through a delivery system so precise it became world famous.

The lunchboxes - called dabbas - usually carry rice, lentils, vegetable curries, rotis (flatbread) and sometimes meat that is freshly cooked in homes across the city's suburbs.

For generations of office workers in Mumbai, home-cooked meals have remained deeply tied to family routine, culture and dietary preferences - making the daily lunchbox an essential part of working life in the fast-paced city.

Each box is marked with an alphanumeric code that tells a dabbawala where it came from, where it is going, which floor of which building it belongs to and how to get it back again. No apps or GPS - just a system passed down through generations of workers who know Mumbai's trains and streets instinctively.

The trade has brought Mumbai - India's financial capital - global attention. Harvard Business School studied it as a masterclass in low-cost logistics. In 2003, even the future King Charles spent some time with dabbawalas on a trip to Mumbai.

The service became synonymous with something Mumbai prided itself on, that beneath the noise and the rush, some things still worked with unshakeable precision.

Now, the men who built that reputation are struggling to survive.

The dabbawala system is believed to have begun in the late 19th Century, when Bombay (now Mumbai) - then under British colonial rule - was rapidly expanding and office workers needed a way to eat fresh, home-cooked food during the day.

At a time when restaurants and canteens were limited, carrying meals from home mattered deeply in a city where food was tied to culture, religion and family routine.

The idea is generally tracked back to a Parsi banker, who hired a man to pick up his lunch from home each morning, deliver it to his office and return the empty box later. A simple system, which soon caught on.

In 1890, a man named Mahadeo Bachche organised the system in its modern form with about 100 workers, according to Shobha Bondre's book Mumbai's Dabbawala: The Uncommon Story of the Common Man.

Early dabbawalas transported lunchboxes on bicycles and marked them with coloured threads so they could be sorted and returned accurately. Over time, those markings were replaced with a unique alphanumeric code system, while deliveries came to rely on bicycles, motorbikes and Mumbai's suburban train network.

At its peak, nearly 4,500 dabbawalas delivered around 50,000 lunch boxes across Mumbai every day, according to organisations that regulate and monitor the service.

But the pandemic disrupted that system. As offices shut and people began working from home, daily deliveries were no longer needed in the same way.

Dabbawalas who once served 20 or 25 office workers a day were suddenly left with only a handful of customers - some with none at all.

With little savings to rely on, many left the trade altogether.

Offices have since reopened, but remote and hybrid work models have sharply reduced the daily demand that once kept Mumbai's dabbawala network running at full scale.

"After the lockdown, work-from-home started," says Kiran Gavande, secretary of the Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Association. "Some people now go to the office only two or three times a week. This had a big impact on Mumbai's dabbawalas."

The number of registered dabbawalas has fallen from around 4,500 in 2018 to roughly 1,500 today, according to the association.

At the same time, Mumbai's relationship with food has changed.

Online food delivery apps like Swiggy and Zomato, alongside a growing number of cloud kitchens offering restaurant meals at low prices, have given people a new set of choices.

Where the dabbawala once had little competition - delivering home-cooked meals for just 2,000 rupees ($21; £16) a month - they now compete with everything from biryani to burgers at the tap of a screen.

Balu Bhagu Shinde spent 20 years as a dabbawala before leaving the trade.

The 41-year-old once earned about 20,000 rupees a month delivering lunchboxes to 15 to 20 customers a day - enough to support a family of five in one of India's most expensive cities. By the end of 2020, only two customers remained.

He waited for offices to reopen but the customers never returned in substantial numbers. Eventually, Shinde became a tuktuk driver.

He now earns around 15,000 rupees a month - less than what he made delivering lunchboxes, but is hobbled by a lack of options.

"There are no customers, no money - what should we do?" Shinde says.

"We are struggling to survive. I am cutting down on household expenses, but I have three children whose education matters the most. At times I have had to borrow money."

For the people who stayed, survival increasingly means working two jobs to just get by.

Mauli Bachche, 40, has been a dabbawala for two decades. His day starts at 07:00 from his home in a Mumbai suburb. By 10:30, he has collected lunchboxes from homes and small kitchens across his neighbourhood and loaded them onto trains bound for offices across the city.

By early afternoon, the deliveries are complete. At 14:00, the return cycle begins.

Then comes his second job, where he collects small daily savings deposits from shopkeepers on behalf of a finance company before finally returning home around 22:00. By then, he has spent up to 15 hours working and travelled more than 100km (62 miles) across the city.

He has two children - a daughter in her final year of school and a son in Grade 10 who hopes to become a cricketer.

"Before Covid, I used to deliver 25 dabbas. Some of those people are now working from home, some have lost their jobs - only 15 customers remain," he says.

"Income from dabbawala work is very low. Everyone is doing more than one job."

For the older men in the business, the worry is not so much for themselves - it is for what comes after them.

"In our time, we managed to survive," says Baban Kadam, who has worked as a dabbawala for 35 years. "But with today's cost of living, the younger generation will not come into this work. Everyone wants a better-paying job or business."

Ramdas Baban Karvande, president of the Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Association, says the network no longer delivers across all parts of the city as it once did.

The association is now considering shift-based work so dabbawalas can take up part-time jobs alongside their morning deliveries.

"This will allow them to earn from other work or small businesses," Karvande says.

Even so, he is unsure how long the system can survive.

"We are continuing for now," he says. "But we cannot say what will happen in the future."

For the time being though, each morning, Mumbai's trains carry men weaving through crowded platforms with stacks of steel lunchboxes - preserving a tradition that was one synonymous with the pace of the city, but now risks being left behind by it.