Organizational Structure Of Dabbawalas

Proposal – A Study on Dabbawalas’ Organizational Structure

Under the Guidance of:

Professor Sushil Kumar

Submitted by: Group 7

Shounak Pal FPM15015

Rupika Khanna FPM15013

Pragna S.P. PGP30384

Tulika Agarwal PGP30402

DeveshGarg PGP30372

Soham Hazra PGP3039

Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow

December13, 2014

Executive Summary

1.0 Introduction

The Mumbai Dabbawalas have been into existence for the past 120 years. They are formally known as MTBSA (Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Association), but most people refer to them as the dabbawalas. A dabbawala is a person whose job is carrying and delivering freshly made food from home in lunch boxes

The association does not follow an institutional hierarchy but has an agreement for decentralized operations, with each group utilizing its own resources to serve and increase the customer base. A person is raised to the managerial level when he gets old and cannot do much heavy work.

5.1.1 Executive Committee

The executive committee of dabbawalas comprises of the vice-president, the secretary general, the treasurer and the directors. A member of the executive committee is appointed for a term of five years. Typically a person rises from being a dabbawala to a mukadam and then rises to become a director, treasurer and secretary. The Executive Committee members meet once every month for discussing problems on the association’s line of operations and service front. All the members of the executive committee continue to be dabbawalas. In a published interview, Medge, the president,

The management philosophy of the dabbawalas considers the mid-level managers as neither supervisors nor leaders. The middle level management is rather seen as an architect for the design and fine-tuning of delivery workforce to perform at optimal levels of efficiency.

The dabbawalas, the mukadams and the thirteen figures who form the executive committee, are all members and not employees. Previously all the people within the institution were employees. However after 1980, they all became members rather than employees following two incidents (the railway worker strike in 1975 and the cotton worker general strike in 1982). This meant that a dabbawala’s earning depends on the ability of each group to attract customer base and also by the role played by the customer.The basic fixed wage for a newly joined dabbawala may start from Rs. 2500 to Rs. 4000. A dabbawala can become a mukadam once he buys a customer line based when it is auctioned off. A mukadam earns on the basis of the number of tiffins his men can deliver; however, the auction price of the customer line bought by him depends on the length of the route covered to deliver them and also it is based on the calculation of how much the line earns every month. Hence, if a line is worth Rs. 20,000 per month, a dabbawala should be ready to