Mumbai's Dabbawalas do not use any technology in their work. Yet, they deliver every day some two lakh tiffin boxes to office-goers like clockwork.
They are now using technology for making another delivery — cash to their homes in the hinterland of Maharashtra.
It is the simple cell phone that has come in handy for the Dabbawalas, who hardly have the time to operate their no-frills bank account, to send money home.
“My day starts at 6-30 in the morning collecting tiffin boxes and am tied up till 1-30 p.m. delivering the lunch boxes to the customers. I do not find time to stand in a queue in a bank to send money to my family at Pune,” says Yamnaji Ghule, President, Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers' Trust.
The white-cotton-clad, Gandhi-capped Dabbawalas are known the world over for their impeccable record of delivering lunch to over 200,000 Mumbiites every day.
Most of them are barely literate, but their precision work-model has made them the subject of case studies at Harvard and other premier business schools. Prince Charles during his visit to India had to adjust his schedule to suit that of the Dabbawalas whose timing would not permit any flexibility.
All these years, they have generally been sending money back home through friends. No longer, thanks to the mobile revolution in the country. A mobile payment company, Paymate, has found a business potential in the urban population that does not use the bank for money transactions.
Mr Ajay Adiseshann, Founder and Managing Director, Paymate, says that the company has offered mobile fund transfer for a few hundred Dabbawalas in the last couple of months and would soon be reaching out to the rest.
Initially, these Dabbawalas, who largely hail from Pune, transferred only about Rs 200 through this new facility.
After a few months though, the average fund transfer has moved up to Rs 1,500 a month. “We then realised that these Dabbawalas were just checking if the new mobile transfer system really worked,” said Mr Adiseshann.
“It takes only a few minutes to transfer money to my relative in the village near Pune who does not have a bank account,” says Mr Sopan Laxman Mare, President, Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers' Association.
To do this, all he needs to do is to go to a Tata Indicom booth — Paymate has a tie-up with Tata Indicom — and give the person there his mobile phone number and pay in the money.
In minutes, he gets an SMS alert giving him the security code and the amount sent, whereupon he calls the recipient in the village and gives him the code.
The recipient goes to the nearest Tata Indicom shop and collects the money.