A dabbawala (also spelled dabbawalla or dabbawallah, called tiffin wallah in older sources) is a worker who delivers hot lunches from homes and restaurants to people at work in India, especially in Mumbai.

The lunchboxes are picked up in the late morning, delivered predominantly using bicycles and railway trains, and returned empty in the afternoon.

[1][2] In the late 1800s, an increasing number of migrants were moving to Bombay from different parts of the country, and fast food and canteens were not prevalent.

So, in 1890, Mahadeo Havaji Bachche started a lunch delivery service in Bombay with about a hundred men.

"Dabba" means a box (usually a cylindrical tin or aluminium container) from Persian: دَبّه, while "wala" is an agentive suffix, denoting a doer or holder of the preceding word.

Some modern infrastructure improvements such as the Navi Mumbai Metro are not used in the supply chain, as cabins do not have the capacity for hundreds of tiffins.

Tiffin distribution is suspended for five days each March as the dabbawalas go home for the annual village festival.

[21] The earliest meetings of the Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Association were held in the open air.

Other portraits adorning the room include those of Bal Gangadhar Tilak and the founder of the association, Mahadeo Havaji Bachche.

[21] The charitable Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Trust consists of nine members who are elected every five years.

(2002)[23][24][25] It is frequently claimed[15] that dabbawalas make less than one mistake in every six million deliveries;[23] however, this is only an estimation from Ragunath Medge, the president of the Mumbai Tiffinmen's Association in 1998, and is not from a rigorous study.

Medge told Subrata Chakravarty, the lead author of the "Fast Food" article by Forbes where this claim first appeared,[26] that dabbawalas make a mistake "almost never, maybe once every two months" and this statement was extrapolated by Subrata Chakravarty to be a rate of "one mistake in 8 million deliveries.

I was impressed by the efficiency and complexity of the process by which some 175,000 tiffin boxes were sorted, transported, delivered and returned each day by people who were mostly illiterate and unsophisticated.

[38] The Top Gear: India Special, a special episode of the British TV series Top Gear, had the presenters Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May attempting to outdo the dabbawalas in efficiency and accuracy, by delivering the lunches with their cars, rather than by train and bicycle.