Mumbai's Dabbawallas

Literally dabbawallas means a person who fulfills obligation of transporting cooked meal dabba or tiffin container from its home to the office where it should reach before lunch time. In Mumbai only, you will find this amazing chain of dabbawallas. Transporting food to thousands of office goers and giving them the energy needed for working properly through the day, these dabbawallas operate through a well-designed network. Operating through the church gate railway station, these dabbawallas are generally illiterate to semi-literate people well

Literally dabbawallas means a person who fulfills obligation of transporting cooked meal dabba or tiffin container from its home to the office where it should reach before lunch time. In Mumbai only, you will find this amazing chain of dabbawallas. Transporting food to thousands of office goers and giving them the energy needed for working properly through the day, these dabbawallas operate through a well-designed network. Operating through the church gate railway station, these dabbawallas are generally illiterate to semi-literate people well versed in delivering the right tiffin container to its owner. On this tour, you will observe the life of an office goer, when his homemaker wife prepares food for him and hand overs the warm dabba with a message to the dabbawallas.

The food container or dabba then gets a coloured sticker and travels all the way through church gate where its journey further starts to its final destination. You will find it exciting that about 200,000 lunch boxes are well transferred and delivered within a single day through this network. This useful concept saw its origin during the ruin of British rulers when majority of British officials used to receive their home cooked meals via a network of tiffin transporters. Slowly changing and improving with time, it has become the backbone of the tiffin industry. You will feel a different kind of happiness when you will find the right person munching his lunch from the well-arranged tiffin box prepared specially by his wife.