Charleston SC writer Ashley Doyle to Contribute to Discovery Channel Production on Mumbai's Dabbawalas

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Charleston, South Carolina, United States of America (Free-Press-Release.com) February 17, 2012 -- Travel writer Ashley Doyle had the unique opportunity to experience life what life is like for a Mumbai dabbawala and will share her unique experience for a Discovery Channel profile on this fascinating lunch delivery process in India.

The word literally means "box person", is a person in India, generally in the city of Mumbai, who is employed in a unique service industry whose primary business is collecting the freshly cooked food in lunch boxes from the residences of office workers delivering it to their respective workplaces and returning the empty boxes back to the customer's residence by using bicycle transportation in one of the busiest cities in the world. While to a Westerner this profession may seem very simple, it is actually a highly specialized service in Mumbai which is over a century old and has become integral to the cultural life of this city. Imagine, a service in London or New York City where someone bicycles to your residence, collects your wife's homemade lunch, bicycles to your office to deliver it (so heaven forbid you don't have to eat at McDonalds) and THEN comes back to collect your empy lunch pail to return it to your wife. Hard to fathom, yet this thriving process takes place everyday in the great city of Mumbai India.

Part of the intigue of the service is that even today it remains essentially low-tech and computer free, with the barefoot delivery men as the prime movers. The success of the system depends on teamwork and time management. The dedication and commitment of the barely literate and barefoot delivery men is astonishing as Forbes estimates only one mistake per six million deliveries with no computer system in use to guarantee such incredibly accurate results.

Each dabbawala, regardless of role, gets paid about two to four thousand rupees per month which is aproximately $40–80 More than 175,000 lunch boxes get moved every day by an estimated 5,000 dabbawalas with utmost punctuality and accuracy despite most of the delivery staff being illiterate.

The BBC has produced a documentary on dabbawalas and currently The Discovery Channel is producing one as well in which Ms Doyle will share some of the information she has gleaned from spending time shadowing dabbawalas and interviewing them for this special segment by the Discovery Channel. So intriguing is the process that Prince Charles personally visited the Dabbawalas in the streets of Mumbai while they organized their deliveries. He had to fit in with their schedule, since their timing was too precise to permit any flexibility. Prince Charles was so impressed , he invited them to his wedding with Camilla Parker Bowles in London in April 2005. As a result of the tremendous publicity associated with that, some of the dabbawalas were invited to give guest lectures in some of the top business schools of India.

The Discovery Channel segment will air late 2012

More information can be found online at http://www.ashleyturnerdoyle.com

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