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‘Amazon of India’ spices up deliveries with dabbawallas

MUMBAI — While Amazon ponders whisking parcels to customers by drones, India’s leading online retailer is launching a low-tech approach to deliveries — by joining forces with 5,000 dabbawallas, more famous for carting hot curry lunches around Mumbai.

The dabbawallas are organised into teams of 20, collecting lunch boxes, sorting them by destination and loading them on to Mumbai’s trains.  Photo: Bloomberg

The dabbawallas are organised into teams of 20, collecting lunch boxes, sorting them by destination and loading them on to Mumbai’s trains. Photo: Bloomberg

MUMBAI — While Amazon ponders whisking parcels to customers by drones, India’s leading online retailer is launching a low-tech approach to deliveries — by joining forces with 5,000 dabbawallas, more famous for carting hot curry lunches around Mumbai.

In an unusual experiment in just-in-time logistics, Flipkart, often described as the “Amazon of India”, is launching a tie-up with the city’s network of bicycle-riding deliverymen, who ferry roughly 130,000 lunch boxes up and down India’s financial capital each day.

The deliverymen are a near-ubiquitous sight on the city’s teeming streets, picking up home-cooked meals in shiny silver tiffin boxes from residences each morning, before cramming on to trains to rush meals to workers in local offices.

From next week, the often-elderly male riders will begin a new stage in their 120-year history by dropping into Flipkart’s distribution centres to pick up everything from books to toys, for delivery where they also collect lunches.

The tie-up is the latest chapter of Flipkart’s battle with Amazon, which last year began pouring US$2 billion (S$2.7 billion) into India’s growing e-commerce market, in part to overhaul the lead enjoyed by its Bangalore-based rival in logistics and delivery.

It also comes amid rising interest in India’s Internet economy from global investors, who have begun pumping big sums into start-ups such as Flipkart, which won a valuation of about US$11 billion at its last fundraising.

The dabbawallas’ decidedly traditional approach to last-mile delivery has won glowing write-ups from management theorists at Harvard Business School and elsewhere, who laud the system’s unerring timeliness and reliability.

Using a complex pyramid structure, the dabbawallas are organised into teams of 20, collecting lunch boxes, sorting them by destination and then loading them on to Mumbai’s trains. Each tiffin box changes hands several times before arriving at its destination. The system, which uses codes of numbers, letters, symbols and colours, has been likened to a “six sigma” process, a management term for a method with fewer than 3.4 errors per million.

Delivering packages in India’s chaotic cities presents particular challenges, from rickety transport infrastructure to the fact that almost no buildings have reliable postcodes, meaning residents are forced to rely on local landmarks for navigation.

“It is so hard to find reliable people who understand the local geographies,” says Mr Neeraj Aggarwal, an executive at Flipkart, who runs the dabbawalla partnership.

“But for people in Mumbai, these guys are trusted, they are almost like family.” THE FINANCIAL TIMES

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