Before I Forget…

Very useful graphic tracking the latest on the India infrastructure situation.

(click thumbnail for larger image)

…..Papers have been written analysing their efficiency by, among others, Singapore’s National University and Mumbai’s National Institute of Industrial Engineering. and in 2004, Harvard Business School published a case study of the system.  The dabbawallas, as they are known, are part of a 5,000-strong workforce that every day collectively rushes tens of thousands of tiffin boxes (stacked cylindrical tins of food) across the city.  The meals are cooked in the morning by wives, sisters and maids and - using a relay system in which each meal changes hands several times - they reach the right person by lunchtime.  The entire process takes place in a matter of hours.  In an unusual example of reverse logistics, the empty tins are collected after lunch and, using the same system, are returned to the housewives who packed them with food earlier that day.  The dabbawallas, “dabba” meaning lunchbox and “walla” meaning the person associated with the trade, work with the most basic equipment.  No databases, software or barcode scanners are used.  And instead of trucks or aircraft, they rely on their feet, their heads, bicycles, carts and the luggage compartments of the trains that make up Mumbai’s extensive suburban rail network.  Once they have collected the tins from their clients, the dabbawallas head to the railway station, where they sort their cargoes according to destination and pack them into the luggage compartments of commuter trains.  A coded system of numbers and signs painted on top of each tin directs it to the correct office, school or government building, as well as to the right floor and room.  Few of the dabbawallas are educated.  Many are illiterate.  And yet every day they deliver more than 170,000 individual meals with almost no mix-ups.  “Our computer is in our head and our Gandhi cap is the computer cover to protect it from the sun or rain,” says Raghunath Medge, head of the Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Charity Trust, the association that governs the dabbawallas.  He carries in his pocket the business card given to him by celebrated strategist CK Prahalad, professor of corporate strategy at Michigan University’s Ross School of Business, a fan of the dabbawallas.  This low-tech approach to an extremely complex and accurate system fascinates academics.  Mr Medge is invited to business schools across India and overseas to talk about his organisation’s approach to supply chain management.  Although he speaks no English, he appears at events with titles such as “Impeccable Logistics and Supply Chain Management” and has made presentations to institutions such as India’s Strategic Communication for Management and the Confederation of Indian Industries.  As well as academic papers, insights into Mumbai’s extraordinary lunch-delivery system are shown to business executives and students on screen.  The film Dabbawallas , made by Paul Goodman, director of the Institute for Strategic Development Carnegie Mellon University, is shown at business schools and sold for use in executive training programmes.  Prof Goodman believes the dabbawallas can offer managers and students another way of looking at supply chain issues. 

He argues that the reason the dabbawallas have attracted the attention of the corporate world is because their system so clearly demonstrates the fact that technology is not the only ingredient necessary for achieving efficient logistics operations.  “These people do it with what I call human and social ingenuity,” he says “And that’s why it resonates with managers because smart managers know that technology is only part of the solution to complex supply chain issues.”  Another characteristic of the system that offers lessons for the corporate world is its reliance on teamwork, with each dabbawalla acting as a vital link in the chain, something Hindustan Lever, the consumer goods company that is part of Unilever, has picked up on.  Every year, it sends a handful of managers to spend a week following the dabbawallas, as part of its teambuilding efforts.  “There’s an incredible amount of interdependence within the systems and that’s why companies are interested,” says Prof Goodman.  “And it’s an example of a high reliability, complicated system that’s very customer- focused.”  Bob Reinheimer, executive director of Duke CE, designed the programme for the financial services executives and accompanied them to India.  He found that customer focus was the most important element of what he hoped the executives would learn from meeting the dabbawallas.  On their trip to India, the executives were asked to consider an answer to the question: “How can we use technology and other means to create true customer intimacy on a global scale?”  After researching the question, the executives would then report to their board on what their company could be doing.  “I was worried everyone would be so lost in all the technology, they might forget some of the fundamentals - pride and loyalty and those human characteristics,” says Prof Reinheimer.  In addition to visiting technology companies, the participants spent a day with the dabbawallas…..”The first thing was that the executives saw it as a very interesting cultural experience - and there’s nothing quite like it,” says Prof Reinheimer.  “But then we pushed deeper and it came down to understanding that customer intimacy has to do with enduring relationships, dependability of service and workers themselves having pride in membership.”….

Reference : http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ef0bb158-9640-11dc-b7ec-0000779fd2ac.html

Singapore’s state-run investment groups have been given the go-ahead to increase their holdings in India’s ICICI Bank beyond the normal ownership limits for foreign groups controlled by the same shareholder.  The Reserve Bank of India yesterday told the Financial Times it would approve of any move by Temasek and Government of Singapore Investment Corporation (GIC) to increase their respective shareholdings in India’s largest private sector financial institution to 10%.  This represents an exemption to the rule that limits foreign investors controlled by the same entity to acquiring a total stake in an Indian bank of up to 10%.  Temasek presently has a 7.37% stake in ICICI while GIC owns 2.24%.  Any exemption could raise eyebrows among foreign investors not just in the banking sector but in other industries, such as telecommunications, in which overseas buyers have faced strict controls on how much they can acquire of domestic companies.  Vodafone of the UK was grilled for weeks by the government this year over whether its plan to buy a controlling stake in domestic mobile operator Hutchison Essar conformed with foreign ownership limits…..A person familiar with the situation at the RBI said the move was a “one-off” reached as part of India’s bilateral trade agreement with Singapore known as the Comprehensive Economic Co-operation Agreement (Ceca)…..

Reference : http://www.ft.com/cms/s/208d4000-1e02-11dc-89f7-000b5df10621.html

The office of Mumbai’s undisputed master of logistics is in a small slum, located “Near Fly-Over Bridge, Andheri East”, as his card says.  But do not let the modest surroundings fool you.  From this small room, Raghunath D. Medge runs what is perhaps India’s most effective delivery force: Mumbai’s army of “dabbawallas”, or tiffin (lunch) box suppliers.  Every day, the dabbawallas deliver with faultless precision 200,000 meals to workers in the city direct from their homes in the suburbs using nothing but the city’s battered commuter railway system and bicycles.  So impressive is their operation that Mr Medge, whose formal title is president of the Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Charity Trust, is regularly visited by everyone from academics and journalists to Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales.  He is also courted by corporates keen to get access to his unparalleled distribution network - his latest suitor is Bharti Airtel, the country’s biggest mobile carrier.  Mr Medge could hardly be more dismissive of all of the attention. “Only the educated people have all sorts of questions about this and that. For a dabbawala, all he cares about is doing his job right and keeping the customer happy.”  To fully appreciate the dabbawallas’ achievements, a person first needs to see the rickety state of Mumbai’s infrastructure.  A trip to the airport that should take 30 minutes can take two hours due to chronic congestion.  The trains are so overcrowded that people are frequently killed falling off the roofs of the carriages or being hit by poles alongside the tracks as they hang out of the doors.  Monsoon rains regularly bring the city to a halt.  Yet none of this fazes the dabbawallas.  Daily, from about 9am, each dabbawalla collects a tiffin carrier - a tall, cylindrical, stacking metal food container loaded with different dishes - from 35 customers’ homes in the suburbs.  The colour-coded tiffin carriers are put in the luggage compartments of suburban trains and taken to the city, where the correct tiffin carriers are delivered to the correct individual customers starting at about 12.30pm, in time for lunch.  From 1.15pm, the dabbawallas begin collecting the tiffin carriers again to deliver them back to individual customers’ homes, in a reversal of the whole process. 

Like any successful corporation, the dabbawallas have a firmly entrenched culture and well-developed sense of mission and branding.  Founded in 1890, they claim to be descendants of the soldiers of Shivaji, the 17th century king who held off the Muslims in the area that is now the western state of Maharashtra, of which Mumbai is the modern capital.  Most of them are shareholders of the trust, drawing a monthly salary of about Rs5,000.  “People recognize us by our Gandhi topi [hat] and our white kurta pyjama, which is our biggest brand,” says Mr Medge.  While their average education is eighth grade, and many are illiterate, the dabbawallas have been given a Six Sigma performance rating of 99.999999 by consultants and a quality management system standard ISO 9001:2000 certificate.  They claim to have an error rate of 1 in 16m.  “We don’t use technology, we rely on manpower,” says Mr Medge.  Little wonder then that companies ranging from Microsoft to Bharti have sought them out as potential partners.  In Bharti’s case, the mobile company is keen to piggy-back on the dabbawallas’ reputation for trustworthiness to help it sell more phones in what is one of the country’s most saturated markets.  Under the scheme, Bharti provides the dabbawallas with advertising pamphlets to distribute when they are doing their rounds.  If a customer rings the number on the pamphlet and a sale is made, the individual dabbawalla gets a commission…..It is also fitting that the dabbawallas recently started accepting bookings by text message.  For his part, Mr Medge does not seem surprised that large corporates vie for his attention.  “Big multinationals come to learn from us,” he shrugs.  And almost nothing stops the dabbawallas.  In the days following a series of bomb blasts on the city’s commuter trains last year, the dabbawallas continued to deliver using the rail lines that were still functioning.  Still, he admits that Mumbai’s infrastructure could be better.  He had his eyes opened during a trip to London in 2005, when his old friend, Prince Charles, invited him to his wedding with Camilla Parker-Bowles.  While thousands of weary British commuters might beg to disagree, London’s Underground was, to Mr Medge, “like heaven”.

Reference : http://www.ft.com/cms/a/92d94ba6-24e4-11d8-81c6-08209b00dd01,id=070508000535.html

Dude, I thought this was a typo in the weekend Financial Times -

India has become home to the most billionaires in Asia, pushing Japan back to the number two spot, according to Forbes magazine.  India added 14 new billionaires in the past year, Forbes said, contrasting sharply with the 400m Indians who still live on less than a dollar a day.