‘Mumbai waalon ko ghar ka swaad milna chahiye’

Ritesh Andre, one of the fourth-generation dabbawalas spearheading the new food delivery service, with the women of Shri Mahila Bachat Gath, one of the first self-help groups the Mumbai Dabbawala’s Association has tied up with to cook meals. Pics/Anurag Ahire

We have a 130-year-old history, but it is important to change with time," Ritesh Andre says. Andre is fourth-generation dabbawala and someone who has spearheaded Dabbawala's Kitchen - centralised kitchens across the city that serve hot, fresh, home-cooked food for lunch every day. These kitchens are a collaboration with women's self-help groups, which Andre says will help empower women. "Mumbai is changing - both the husband and wife work now. We aim to solve the problem of getting a dabba with our new programme, where we employ women's self-help groups to cook fresh ghar ka khana, which our dabbawalas will then deliver."

The food delivery service started on a trial basis on Tuesday and already saw about 100 to 200 orders pouring in, Andre says. The challenge while executing the programme was deciding how to source natural, home-cooked food that would be healthy and tasty at the same time. "When you cook in bulk, the food is often tasteless," he explains. "Or else, using too many spices or oil makes it taste like restaurant food. We wanted to give our customers that ghar ki feeling - as if they're consuming maa ke haath ka khana. That was when we realised that there are a lot of women's self-help groups in Mumbai, who are already cooking and serving meals."

The four women sitting around Andre nod in agreement. They're from the Shri Mahila Bachat Gath, a self-help group in Dahisar and one of the first self-help groups out of the 20-odd groups the Dabbawalas Association has tied up with. Akshata Putran, one of the members, exclaims in a burst of enthusiasm that "it's very fun to work together cooking meals". Meenakshi Shinde explains that right now, they are all working together to cook the meals, learning to pack it in the special dabbas that have been created for the purpose, and experimenting with how much quantity needs to be produced. Later on, each of them will work separately from their homes.

Around five kgs of rice and vegetables are transformed into meals every day, which are then packed in black plastic boxes and stacked in the cardboard box specially designed for transportation. The orders will be allotted to the self-help groups on the basis of location; for example, orders from Thane will go to a nearby self-help group, who will then start preparing the tiffins for pick-up the next day.

Andre explains how the dabbawalas are moving away from their colour-coding system, an intricate process of memorization and detailing that has been perfected over the last 50 years. The complex "coding" they use to process and execute orders would put any AI to shame. For the uninitiated, the system works by converting addresses into designated symbols based on which part of Mumbai they come from. "Mumbai is divided into two parts - East and West. Every location in Mumbai is given a code, for example, Borivali West is ‘B' and it is coded red. Dadar and Dahisar have the same symbol, ‘D', so if ‘D' is written on the top of the box, it is Dadar, and if is written on the bottom, the dabbawalla knows it is Dahisar." The destination station is assigned a number, while the pick-up location is assigned an alphabet.

Andre recalls how his great-grandfather started delivering dabbas in the year 1890. "He was working for the a Parsi family as an office boy. One time, a Parsi banker asked my great-grandfather, Mahadu Bachche, if he could deliver his lunchbox from his home to office, because he was late for work. From one customer and one lunchbox, today we have over 5,000 dabbawalas and we deliver two lakh lunchboxes from homes to offices."

The women, who previously cooked food for their own orders only, have now expanded the scale of their orders, which not only saves them from the hassle of cooking over and over again but also ensures that they finish their cooking, once and for all, by 9 AM every day - and have an additional boost to their incomes. And as they're cooking dishes they're good at - Saloni Parab says she's an expert at cooking neer dosas, modaks, puranpolis, idlis, and medu wadas - they're happy, they say, that their dabbas "are reaching the heart of Mumbai".

The idea of the centralised kitchens germinated two years ago, but due to the pandemic and other constraints, is only operational now. "There are more than 500 home caterers working with the dabbawalas today. However, there was a chance that they would expand their own businesses and our dabbawalas would lose their employment. Now, however, after the COVID-19 pandemic, they have also lost most of their business… that is why we want to mobilise them."

When asked whether they see a threat from Zomato or Swiggy, which have also recently started offering "home-cooked meals", Andre says, "They are only able to deliver up to 5 kilometers, while we provide delivery all over Mumbai. Also, we employ local kitchens, so we provide employment to small-time cooks and chefs, not restaurant chains."

The women say that they have been searching for employment for a long time and are happy to be contributing to an endeavor like this. "We are from different backgrounds," Shinde smiles, looking around at the other women. "But we work together, and it is a nice experience."