9.00 AM: Dabbawala starts pick-up rounds

9.15 AM: Housewife hands over hubby tiffin lunch

10.00 AM: Dabbas gathered, the destination sorting starts

12.20 AM: Crate by crate, all sorted

11.30 AM: Loaded in bulk on local trains

11.30 AM: Unload and re-sort, on arrival downtown

11.45 AM: Carted off to the disaggregation points

12.25 PM: On its way to your desk

Get your error rate down to one in every 16 million transactions, and maybe even you'd be feted much the same way. Management guru C.K. Prahalad would term you "an incredible success story". The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) would invite you to be a special speaker at its Leadership Summit. The Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad, would invite you to make a presentation on your success to its students. And Forbes magazine would glowingly describe yours as a Six-Sigma operation.

But to be called the "soul of Mumbaikers", as Mumbai's dabbawala system was called by the late columnist Behram Contractor (to add to all the other honours), you would have to be more than just a logistical success of clockwork efficiency. You'd have to command awe. You'd have to push the pace of the city's pulse. You'd have to demonstrate what could be done with no resources other than precision planning, a few hundred handcarts, 4,500 dedicated workmen (dabbawalas) and some 1,75,000 lunch boxes (the actual dabbas).

Network Buzz

What this network does, in a nutshell, is simple. It delivers fresh home-cooked lunch from each of those 1.75 lakh homes to each of the intended 1.75 lakh people's office desks-with individualised accuracy, never a lunch switched for another. The service charge: a mere Rs 150-300 per month.

Today, there are some 120 registered dabbawala groups in operation, drawing an estimated Rs 50 crore in revenue. But the quality of service remains consistent-a sign of how institutionalised the system has become. The system, after all, has been around for 120 years. And if Raghunath Medge, 47, President of the Dabbawala Association, is to be believed, it's nowhere near the end of its lifecycle. The service will stop, he says, if and only if Mumbai's trains stop.

Of course, the city's geographical pattern helps. Most of Mumbai's office-goers live in the suburbs and work downtown, and there are local trains connecting the two points-which form hubs for hub-and-spoke sub-networks.

Work starts in the morning, with dabbawalas going door-to-door in the suburbs, collecting the lunch packs, grouping them in stages and strapping them into crates to be handcarted to the local station. Here, the sorting process takes about 20 minutes, before the consignments are loaded onto trains headed downtown. On arrival, the consignments are sorted again and carted off in different directions for stage-by-stage disaggregation and eventual delivery office-to-office. By 12.30, your lunch pack is right there on your desk for you to dig in. Once you're done, the pack is sent back in a precise reversal of the process.

The entire system works on a military discipline based on a shared agenda and a common protocol. The workforce, remember, is not even educated to the secondary level. Each dabba bears a unique code (like 'VLP E 3 9E12')-enough for any dabbawala to decipher. It is a highly information-rich network, don't forget.

Corporate Role Model

No wonder the dabbawala system is a favourite among Indian academics. Mangesh Korgaonker, Head of SJM School of Management, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Mumbai, describes it as an error-free solution to "a complex delivery problem". According to Pankaj Chandra, Professor of Operations and Technology Management, IIM Ahmedabad, it works on the principle of "centralised planning and decentralised implementation", and owes its success to breaking "complexities into small manageable entities that are linked together".

To Dhondi Sorgey, a dabbawala, however, it's a primary duty he's doing-bringing 'anna' (rice) to people, for around Rs 4,500 a month.

The whole system operates as a loose cooperative, and with customer satisfaction levels so high, there's little need for a rigid operating structure. Bonus revenue is always welcome, though. A digestive brand once used the dabbas as an advertising medium. That's innovation enough for the system. A classic is a classic, you see.