Flipkart hires army of lunchbox cyclists to speed deliveries

While Amazon ponders whisking parcels to customers by drones, India's leading online retailer is launching a radical low-tech approach to deliveries - by joining forces with 5,000 dabbawalas, more famous for carting hot curry lunches around Mumbai.

In an unusual experiment in just-in-time logistics, Flipkart, which is often described as the "Amazon of India", is launching a tie-up with the city's network of bicycle-riding deliverymen, who ferry roughly 130,000 lunch boxes up and down India's financial capital each day.

Sporting their trademark white caps, the deliverymen are a near-ubiquitous site on the city's teeming streets, picking up home-cooked meals in shiny silver tiffin boxes from residences each morning, before cramming on to packed urban trains to rush meals to hungry workers in local offices.

From next week the often-elderly male riders will begin a new stage in their 120-year history - by dropping into Flipkart's modern distribution centres to pick up packages containing everything from books to children's toys, for delivery in areas where they also collect lunches.

The tie-up marks the latest intensification of Flipkart's fierce battle with Amazon, which last year began pouring $2bn into India's rapidly growing e-commerce market, in part to overhaul the lead enjoyed by its Bangalore-based rival in areas like logistics and delivery systems.

It also comes amid rising interest in India's burgeoning internet economy from global technology investors, who have begun pumping unprecedented sums into start-ups like Flipkart, which won a valuation of about $11bn at its last fundraising round.

The latest weapon in Flipkart's growth strategy might at first appear rudimentary, but the dabbawalas decidedly traditional approach to last-mile delivery has won glowing write-ups from management theorists at Harvard Business School and elsewhere, who laud the system's unerring timeliness and reliability.

Using a complex pyramid structure, the dabbawalas are organised into teams of 20, collecting lunch boxes, sorting them by destination and then loading them on to the luggage compartment of Mumbai's trains. Each tiffin box changes hands several times before arriving at its destination, generally on the handlebars of another dabbawalas' bicycle.

The system - which uses complex codes involving numbers, letters, symbols and colours to label its lunch boxes - has often been compared to a "six sigma" process, a management term for a method with less than 3.4 errors per million.

"Our network in Mumbai, our system, our management, and the timing we have - no company, no group has this," says Dashrat Kedari, a Mumbai-based dabbawala, who left his village as a teenager and travelled to the city to learn the trade from an elderly relative.

Delivering packages in India's chaotic cities presents particular challenges, from rickety transport infrastructure to the fact that almost no buildings have reliable postcodes, meaning residents are forced to rely on local landmarks for navigation.

"It is so hard to find reliable people who understand the local geographies," says Neeraj Aggarwal, an executive at Flipkart, who runs the dabbawala partnership. "But for people in Mumbai, these guys are trusted, they are almost like family."

Although only a dozen workers will deliver parcels initially, Flipkart says up to 800 dabbawalas will join in time, coming close to doubling the group's distribution network around Mumbai.

The Flipkart tie-up could even signal a new period of growth for the deliverymen, who generally hail from the same group of villages outside the city, and claim to be the descendants of warriors who fought in army of Chhatrapati Shivaji, a venerated 17th-century warlord.

Mr Kedari says he hopes his monthly take home pay of just Rs12,000 ($193) could rise by as much as Rs3,000 thanks to Flipkart's new business, bolstering a profession that has been passed down through the generations, but which more recently has struggled to attract new, younger workers.

"In 120 years we have had no complaints, there are no stories about dabbawalas creating trouble," says Mr Kedari, who has been in the trade for more than two decades. "That is why these companies come to us."

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