The Dabbawallas

PROGRAM DESCRIPTION
Throughout the world, work is a central part of our lives. This documentary
captures an unusual form of work in India. Each day in Mumbai (Bombay), India, a city
of more than 16 million, people called Dabbawallas move lunches from peoples homes
to their work places. Dabba means box, and walla means person. The metal box holds
the freshly made lunch from home.
This process is very complicated and large in scale. More than 100,000 lunches
get moved every day by about 4,000 Dabbawallas. The lunch boxes are picked up at the
homes and brought to a first sorting place. Then, they are moved to another location
often by train and resorted. After a series of moves and sortings, the boxes eventually
reach the customers. All these occur in the morning sometime between 8:30 and 1:00.
Then the process is reversed. The boxes are picked up in the places of work and
eventually brought home. The striking feature of this process of collecting, sorting, and
delivery is that it is as complicated as what we see being done on a daily basis by
companies like Federal Express, but this process operates with no computers, technology,
or modern-day business procedures. The interesting questions are: How does this large
scale and complicated sorting and delivery process work? Why has it persisted for more
than 100 years? The underlying themes of the film are (a) what people in moredeveloped countries can learn from workers in less-developed countries, (b) the reliance
upon human and social ingenuity for organizing rather than relying on external
mechanisms such as technology, and (c) according respect for the seldom-heard voices of
disadvantaged populations in the world.
The video explores this question at a number of different levels. We describe a
typical day of a Dabbawalla. We go to the homes where the food is prepared and then
picked up by the Dabbawalla. We follow the Dabbawalla on his bike until he gets to the
sorting place, where his co-workers are actively involved in moving boxes from one
place to another. We ride on the train in the special car designed for the Dabbawallas,
and follow them through more sorting until the lunch boxes are delivered to the customer.
At another level, we interview the customers about why they use this service, the
Dabbawallas about their life, and the people who help manage this complicated sorting
and delivery process.
As the video unfolds, the viewer should understand not only what these people
do, but perhaps more important, why this very large scale and complicated system has
worked for 100 years. Some of the mechanisms that will emerge from this video include
all the Dabbawallas come from the same city. In order to become a member of this
organization, they need to buy a position in the organization the same way that someone
may buy a seat on the stock exchange. The organization for which the Dabbawallas work
has a banking system. This facilitates them buying a seat or membership in the
organization. It also creates ties in the organization. In addition, during the interviews,
we will learn about a court system that exists to adjudicate disputes among the

Dabbawallas. These and other forms of human and social ingenuity emerge in the work
of the Dabbawallas on the streets in Bombay.
The film also serves as a counterpoint. Instead of asking how knowledge in
developing countries can help less developed countries, this film focuses on how
developed countries can learn from less developed countries.