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MUMBAI, INDIA, August10, 1998: To appreciate Indian efficiency at its best, watch this city’s tiffinwallahs at work, urges business magazine Forbes. In this old article, Forbes explains that these are the men who deliver 175,000 lunches (or “tiffin”) each day to offices and schools throughout Mumbai, the business capital of India. Lunch is in a tin container consisting of a number of bowls held together in a frame. The meals are prepared in the homes of the people who commute into Mumbai each morning and delivered in their own tiffin carriers. After lunch, the process is reversed. Despite the complexity, the 5,000 tiffinwallahs make a mistake only about once every two months, according to Ragunath Medge, 42, president of the Mumbai Tiffinmen’s Association. That’s one error in every 8 million deliveries, or 16 million if you include the return trip. The charge for this extraordinary service is just 150 rupees ($3.33) per month. Forbes has done a more recent article (which we couldn’t locate, but perhaps an HPI reader can) assigning the system a “Sigma 6” performance rating — a score rarely received by any major company in the world.

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