UNI
Bangalore, Aug 23: With their pyjamas and Gandhi caps, dabbawallas may not look suave or wear a corporate hat, but the Mumbai's lunch carriers on Wednesday taught some useful lessons to the MBA students in a city college on how to excel in the corporate world with time sense and hard work.
“You have to see well to do well in your career. If you can't stick to the deadlines, you are as good as dead. If I can't deliver the lunch box in time, I will have to take it back to my client's home and you can imagine how useful it can be if I do that,” Raghunath D Medge, president of Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Charity (NMTBC) trust, the body of 5,000-strong Mumbai-dabbawallas explained to the students of the international school here.
Speaking at an orientation programme, he said there was no substitute for hard work and to ensure personal growth in any field, one had to give his or her customer's 'health' the top priority.
“A good leader can never make things run properly if there are flaws in the system. One should never compromise with discipline in the organisation, as it is the integrity of that association. The prime principle is that customer satisfaction should be the important goal of any company,” he said. Medge said punctuality and time management were given top priority by the dabbawallas. “Whether it rains or shine, or even if there is a calamity, we never get delayed even for a few minutes. For years, we have been taking the same trains and buses. We have to cover a distance of 65 to 75 km a day in three hours. We cannot afford any delay,” NMTBC secretary Gangaram Talekar, who also spoke to the students, explained.
He said the tiffin distribution required negligible technology and that was one reason why dabbawallas had been so successful. “We may not employ high technology, but our manpower is highly efficient. Intelligent people waste their time asking too many questions whereas we only focus on fulfilling our responsibility.”
“We don't know the exact meaning of error, but one thing that I know is when you are serving someone, it is not acceptable to make mistakes,” Talekar said.
The dabbawallas carry two lakh tiffin boxes every day, resulting in a total transaction of four lakh per day. But amazingly, the error rate was one in 16 million transactions, earning them the six sigma certification.