Dabba Radio Mission

For those not familiar with Mumbai, the Dabbawallahs are a group famous for their impeccable service of delivering 150,000-200,000 lunches everyday. Most are illiterate and use colors and a few numbers to mark the destination the tiffin must arrive at after navigating the local trains, bicycles, and enormous tiffin flats that the Dabbawallahs carry on their heads.

According to The Economist, they make 1 mistake for every 6,000,000 deliveries, giving them a Six Sigma rating and putting them ahead of all modern courier services – accomplishing it all without literacy or modern technology.

The Dabbawallahs are known for not being interrupted by weather, including Mumbai’s notorious monsoons and scorching heat. We felt that the Dabbawallahs summed up a lot of characteristics that we want to emulate in our radio show: accurate, reliable, and uninterrupted.

Most notably, though, is their use of unconventional means to deliver their content. Because of the ban on news and current events, we also must deliver our content in unconventional (non-FM) ways. You can listen to all of our shows on our website, download them as an mp3, or subscribe to them as a podcast using an application like iTunes. We are constantly working on improving our delivery methods, though, so look out for updates on mobile access and dial-a-show capability.

If you subscribe to The Economist, read about the dabbawalas here or check out this New York Times bit.

mission statement

Dabba Radio is India's first independent news radio network. We create great shows on a range of important topics: from news, politics, and current events to food, art, music, and culture. We then disseminate these shows over as many mediums as possible, including cell phones, internet streaming, and podcasts.

We believe that free access to information is one of the key ingredients in creating a robust society. A citizenry that is well informed and thinks inquisitively about the world around them will continually work toward its improvement.

In accordance with these beliefs, our mission is to create programming that meets the highest standards of excellence in journalism across a broad range of topics that are of cultural significance to our listeners. We endeavour to make this information easily accessible to all individuals across the wide economic spectrum of society.

Knowledge is a precious commodity, we believe it should be free.