Here are a couple of articles I came across the net, on a profession requiring supreme timing, collaborative efforts and stamina - lunch-box delivery in Bombay. Most Bombayiites, including myself, have at sometime used this facility. I have always been a strong admirer of this system, and was so glad to have come across these informative articles. For fear of them becoming lost links and vanishing from our cyber-reach in the future, I have reproduced them below.

Bombay dispatch: A Bombay lunchbox
Guardian Unlimited
Monday June 24, 2002
by Luke Harding

[Luke Harding reports on the tiffin-wallahs, or packed lunch boys, whose ingenious meal delivery service owes much to the Indian flair for mathematics]

In her third floor apartment in Bombay, Mrs Gavai is busy making pasta. It is mid-morning. A delightful breeze blows through the open window into her kitchen.

In the courtyard below, noisy crows hop between the banyan trees and the football stadium across the road. The distant honking of a car rises into the pearly monsoon sky, before melting away somewhere over the Arabian Sea.

Mrs Gavai, meanwhile, spoons the pasta with vegetables into a small aluminium pot. She then turns to the chana bhatura, or deep-fried chick peas, bubbling away on the back of her stove. "This is a little bit spicy. It's got red chilli in it, as well as ginger, garlic and masala powder. My kids like spicy food," she explains.

She puts the two pots into a small pink lunchbox. She zips it up carefully. 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.

With impeccable timing, the doorbell rings. A young man wearing pyjama-style trousers and shirt steps inside. It is Lahu, Mrs Gavai's ever-reliable tiffin or dabba-wallah. Lahu collects the packed lunch, legs it down three flights of stairs, and attaches the tiffin bag to his Hercules bicycle. He then sets off at Chris Boardman-like speed across Colaba, Bombay's genteel neo-Gothic central district.

We try to follow in a black and yellow taxi. 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.

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.

Every 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.

Parking their bicycles outside a succession of middle-class tower blocks, they collect up to 160,000 home-cooked lunches. They take the tiffins to suburban railway stations. There, they sort them out by destination on the platform. The lunches then travel southwards into the centre of Bombay. Here, the dabba-wallahs deliver them by 12.45pm sharp to hungry office workers. 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.

The system owes much to the innate Indian genius for mathematics (it was an ancient Indian mathematician who invented the concept of zero). And it recently won international acclaim from an unlikely source, the normally arid American business magazine Forbes.

Forbes 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. In other words, for every six million tiffins delivered, only one fails to arrive. This error rate means in effect that a tiffin goes astray only once every two months.

It is a rare day indeed when a customer's deep-fried rotis fail to turn up. The sigma rating was the same as that given to the top bluechip company Motorola - not bad considering that most dabba-wallahs are illiterate.

"We are very proud," Raghunath Medge, president of the tiffin-wallahs' union, the Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Charity Trust said. "Our ancestors carried swords in their hands. Now we carry tiffins instead."

The beauty of the system, Mr Medge explained, is the colour coding used on the top of each tiffin box. The home address, office address, railway stations of delivery and pick-up are all crunched into a small series of letters and numbers, painted by hand.

An Indian entrepreneur, Mahadeo Havaji Bacche, invented the tiffin distribution business back in 1890, to meet the culinary needs of Bombay's rapidly expanding working population, both British and Indian. His idea caught on. Over the years the codes became simpler. By the 1950s and 1960s the tiffin-wallahs were delivering some 200,000 dabbas or lunch-boxes a day.

Latterly, the figure has fallen away a bit with the advent of fast food joints and western-style restaurants. But there is no prospect of tiffin-wallah unemployment: Bombay's conservative middle-classes remain sceptical of what is described as "outside" food. They prefer their chapatis cooked at home, preferably by mum. And they are deeply attached to their food- not just the standard rice and dhal - but also the region's abundant seafood: the pomfrets and the red snapper; the king crabs and the prawns; and - of course - the succulent, magnificent Alphonso mangoes.

"Your stomach can get off if you eat outside food," Mrs Gavai pointed out sagaciously. "In restaurants you don't know what oil they use or how they prepare. You get infections." Over a small glass cup of sweet Indian tea, Mr Medge invited us to follow a tiffin on its Odyssean journey across the city. We accepted and at 7am the next morning got onto a commuter train at Bombay's chaotic Churchgate station, heading north. Our destination was the distant suburb of Andheri.

Outside, a light monsoon drizzle was falling. Next to the railway line, meanwhile, dozens of men sat crapping in the green undergrowth under black umbrellas. Wedged in a second-class carriage my eye fell on the adverts above the luggage rack - for Anchor toothpaste, the Bandra Shah piles clinic and for Moods Supreme Condoms (Dotted for Extra Pleasure. India's Most Sensational Sex Accessory).

The train ­ on which the tiffin distribution system entirely relies - was thunderously fast, stopping for only five or ten seconds at each station. At rush hour, hundreds of commuters hang off the sides of the carriages; most days someone falls off.

From Andheri station, it was a short walk to Mr Medge's box-like office, (turn left at the tea-stall and the electrician's, down the narrow alley). The office walls were decorated with portraits of the tiffin wallahs' favourite Hindu gods, the lute-playing Dyaneshwar and his friend Tukaram.

Amazingly, almost all of the tiffin-wallahs come from the same small village near Pune, four hours away from Bombay. Most are related to each other, and for five days each March tiffin distribution is suspended as around 1,000 tiffin-wallahs go home for the annual village festival.

Mr Medge introduced me to his nephew, Rohidas, at 26 a veteran tiffin wallah of 12 years' experience. Like all members of his profession, he was wearing a white Nehru cap. The cap is not an affectation but a necessity: tiffin-wallahs are expected to carry on their heads wooden tiffin baskets containing up to 45 metal lunch-boxes. The baskets can weigh up to 90kg.

Rohidas' round took him to Vile Parle, a pleasant nearby suburb. Did he enjoy his line of work? "It's a nice job. I'm not qualified to work in an office," he admitted. Shadowing the bicycling Rohidas in an auto-rickshaw, we reached a five-storey block of flats, and the home of Parag Oza, a 29-year-old manager with the Dutch bank ABN Amro.

Mr Oza was of course away at work in downtown Bombay, but his 23-year-old bride of one month, Tanvi, was busy preparing his tiffin with her new mother-in-law.

"It is a very good service. They are not losing anything," Tanvi said. Parag's lunch looked delicious: his tiffin consisted of rotis, piquant Indian chutney, a chopped tomato salad, potato bhajis, tacos, and a flask of creamy white buttermilk. "It's full of calcium. It's very nice," Parag's mum said.

The fact that tiffins are made by women and consumed by men is hardly surprising. India remains a traditional society where most marriages are arranged; and families are "joint" - new brides end up living not only with their husbands, but also with their husband's parents.

Earlier, I had asked Mr Medge whether, as had been rumoured, women sometimes used the tiffin service to send romantic notes to their partners.

The question was greeted with vehement tut-tutting: it is against the tiffin-wallahs' code of honour to open up the customer's lunchbox. "I haven't sent him a note yet but we did send his chequebook once," Tanvi confirmed.

Rohidas scooped up the tiffin and we set off. Our destination, via several other apartment blocks, was platform two of Vile Parle station and the 10.37am train back into Bombay. As the departure time approached, dozens of other tiffin-wallahs arrived at a wobbling jog, carrying enormous tiffin baskets on their heads.

The tiffins were unloaded and sorted, ready to be handed over to colleagues further down the line. As the 531 Western Railways train appeared the tiffin-wallahs got into military formation. The train pulled up. It was clear that the luggage compartment where the tiffins were to be stowed was already full of bodies. But incredibly, the human sea parted to let the tiffins on with a minimum of abuse. It was all over in four seconds. The train hurtled off again, with us on board.

"It's a very sociable job," Sapan Mare, a tiffin-wallah since 1970 explained, as we rattled into central Bombay. "I like the fact that I meet so many people every day. Between 100 to 110 members of my family are in the tiffin business. I come from a family where four generations have been tiffin-wallahs," he added proudly.

At the next stop, a youth got on with a consignment of tummy trimmers. While there are undoubtedly some fat people in Bombay, the home of India's excessive film industry, nobody in the luggage compartment seemed in need of a tummy trim.

The tiffin-wallahs are self-employed. To join the profession, you need to donate 30,000 rupees (£460) to the tiffin-wallahs' union. After that you are guaranteed a monthly income of 5,000 rupees (£77) ­ a good salary by Indian standards - and a job for life. The tiffins are delivered six days a week for the paltry sum of 150 rupees (£2.30) a month.

"The job lasts for as long as you are strong," Mr Medge said. The tiffin-wallahs are all non-meat eating Hindus who belong to the same caste - although their customers - and the contents of their lunch boxes - reflect Bombay¹s rich ethnic mix: they are Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Jain and Parsi. (The Parsis are Zoroastrians who settled in Bombay after fleeing religious persecution in Iran; keen philanthropists, they invented dhansaak, mutton or chicken cooked in rich dhal sauces).

Forty minutes after getting on, we alight at Churchgate station. Rohidas sprints down the platform with his tiffins, and emerges in the street. We cross through a jam of black and yellow Fiat taxis to the opposite pavement.

Dozens of tiffin-wallahs have congregated here under a green flame tree; more arrive every minute. Groups of three or four dabba-wallahs push carts laden with hundreds of tiffins along the middle of the road. The sun is shining: it is another sultry Bombay day.

The tiffin-wallahs sort out the lunchboxes at a furious speed. Rohidas then moves off again with Parag's tiffin; we walk off to another tiffin sorting station five minutes away, under the shadow of Bombay's Victorian Gothic university, designed by the architect of St Pancras, Gilbert Scott.

There is a minor hiatus as an estate car runs over a tiffin basket; leaving at least one lunch box terminally dented. The tiffin-wallahs have a brief cup of tea. Rohidas then sets off again on foot to Nariman Point, Bombay's commercial heart.

Here, numerous banks, insurance companies and oil conglomerates have their offices; and numerous employees have their tiffin. Rohidas delivers Parag's lunch-box on time; Parag then gamely emerges to talk to us.

"I get really good Indian food," he explains. "My tiffin is so popular that the people in my office attack it. They want it. I'm willing to share, of course.

"Once a day it is good to have home food," he adds. "We are [upper caste] Hindu Brahmins so in the house meat is not cooked. But I will eat meat in restaurants: I'm not especially religious."

From his office, the muddy, dirty, frothy sea stretches away to Bombay's grotty Chowpatty beach, and then sweeps off to infinity. The boats of the Koli people, Bombay's original fishermen, bob nearby; 40ft away a man with his lunghi pulled up is defecating next to the waves.

The origins of the word tiffin remain obscure: its earliest recorded use in British India dates back to 1811. The delightful Hobson-Jobson dictionary of Anglo-Indian words suggest several possible origins (the Arabic word tafunnun - "diversion" - and the Chinese ch'ih-fan - "eat rice") ­ only to loftily dismiss them.

Like verandah, pyjamas, rickshaw, curry and junk, tiffin is an India-derived noun that has irrevocably penetrated the English language; and we should be grateful for it.

We never do manage to catch up again with Lahu, the Chris Boardman-like tiffin-wallah. But we do finally track down Mrs Kalpana Gavai's eight-year-old son, Shantanu, after he has returned from his English-medium school in Bombay's Cuffe Parade.

How did he like the pasta? "It was nice," he says. Shantanu admits that his favourite food is Pav Bhaji, a Bombay street dish made from bread, spiced vegetables and green peas. On occasion his mother does not have time to cook and sends him 20 rupees in his tiffin box instead.

"I sometimes eat idli [South Indian rice dumplings] and pizza in my school canteen. Mostly though I prefer tiffin. Sometimes I spend my money on buying small cars," he admits. "I also like McDonald's Happy Meals. I've got 20 cars from McDonald¹s that you get with a veg pizza puff."

Shantanu's dad Kumar, an oil executive, is also a fan of the tiffin service. "It's a very good system. These people are unique in nature," he explains.

In the centre of the Gavai¹s living room is a large plastic idol of Lord Ganesha, Hinduism's much-loved elephant god. Bombay is celebrating Ganesh Chaturthi, an 11-day festival dedicated to Ganesh, who brings wisdom and prosperity.

Mrs Gavai has laid out several offerings to the pot-bellied idol: a plate of plantains, apples, and a large green jackfruit; several nuts; a coconut; and a tray of modak, sweets made from milk and sugar. At the end of the festival the plastic Ganesh is tossed into the sea, together with thousands of others.

That night, from the window of my hotel, I watch as several Ganesh processions make their way noisily along the harbour front, accompanied by singing, dancing, banging of drums, and much flirting between teenage boys and girls.

Some of the Ganesh idols are carried; others are pushed along on handcarts. I even spot one Ganesh idol riding sedately in the back of a taxi.

Some of the tiffin-wallahs have gone to bed already in the power cut-prone northern suburbs; but others join in the festivities. "Last night I went to bed at 3am. But I still managed to get up again at 6am," Mr Mare, the veteran tiffin-wallah, said. "We are very strong people."

Email Luke Harding

:: read article online at: www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4447391,00.html

Fast food
Forbes Magazine

by Subrata N. Chakravarty and Naazneen Karmali
August 10, 1998

"Efficient organization" is not the first thought that comes to mind in India, but when the profit motive is given free rein, anything is possible. To appreciate Indian efficiency at its best, watch the tiffinwallahs at work.

These are the men who deliver 175,000 lunches (or "tiffin") each day to offices and schools throughout Mumbai (formerly Bombay), the business capital of India. Lunch is in a tin container consisting of a number of bowls, each containing a separate dish, held together in a frame. The meals are prepared in the homes of the people who commute into Mumbai each morning and delivered in their own tiffin carriers. After lunch, the process is reversed.

And what a process it is -- despite the complexity, the 5,000 tiffinwallahs make a mistake only about once every two months, according to Ragunath Medge, 42, president of the Mumbai Tiffinmen's Association.

That's one error in every 8 million deliveries, or 16 million if you include the return trip. "If we made 10 mistakes a month, no one would use our service," says the craggily handsome Medge.

How do they do it?

The meals are picked up from commuters' homes in suburbs around central Mumbai long after the commuters have left for work, delivered to them on time, then picked up and delivered home before the commuters return.

Each tiffin carrier has, painted on its top, a number of symbols which identify where the carrier was picked up, the originating and destination stations and the address to which it is to be delivered.

After the tiffin carriers are picked up, they are taken to the nearest railway station, where they are sorted according to the destination station. Between 10:15 a.m. and 10:45 a.m. they are loaded in crates onto the baggage cars of trains.

At the destination station they are unloaded by other tiffinwallahs and resorted, this time according to street address and floor. The 100- kilogram crates of carriers, carried on tiffinwallahs' heads, hand- wagons and cycles are delivered at 12:30 p.m., picked up at 1:30 p.m., and returned whence they came.

The charge for this extraordinary service is just 150 rupees ($3.33) per month, enough for the tiffinwallahs, who are mostly self-employed, to make a good living. After paying Rs60 per crate and Rs120 per man per month to the Western Railway for transport, the average tiffinwallah clears about Rs3, 250.

Of that sum, Rs10 goes to the Tiffinmen's Association. After minimal expenses, the rest of the Rs50,000 a month that the Association collects go to a charitable trust that feeds the poor.

Superb service and charity too. Can anyone ask for more?

:: read article online at www.forbes.com/global/1998/0810/0109078a.html