Sunil Sethi: Purgatory to hell: A municipal story

AL FRESCO

June is a cruel month in Delhi. In addition to the uncomfortable weather it is the time of year when many residents must grapple with the municipality for such matters as payment of house tax, and a more corrupt, complex and incompetent local administration it would have been hard to find anywhere in urban India. For years the municipal corporation's office for central Delhi was housed in a weird location "" in a series of dilapidated, stinking structures wedged in the crowded area between the old city and new in the Turkman Gate area. They looked like the putrefying remains of some lost civilisation.

Then a couple of years ago, the civic authorities under pressure from residents' groups, decided that house tax procedures must be simplified and the office shifted to an improved location. Last week, in search of a missing document, I went back again. It was just a short trip from purgatory to hell.

The new municipality is now in a dark, stifling, subterranean warren of offices opposite Ram Manohar Lohia hospital. Nothing has changed; in fact, all the old paraphernalia "" of rusting iron cupboards, broken wooden benches, bent metal chairs and gazillions of dusty files spilling from shelves "" has just been lifted wholesale and dumped underground. In fact, the new place is far more hazardous than the old. The dingy offices are separated by plastic partitions and there is only one entrance and exit. During powers cuts the 250-odd junior staff sweat it out (the officers have conveniently parked themselves above ground level). Were there a short circuit or fire they would instantly perish.

My local zonal officer (who I found despite a lazy receptionist swatting flies and past a suffocating hall where the queue system had clearly broken down since morning) took me on a tour. The urinals stank, there was not a drop in the water cooler. "These are the conditions we work in. They are far worse than in our previous broken down old offices. Lakhs of central Delhi's house tax, education, heath and licensing papers are stored here. How can you hope to find a missing paper in a few days?"

From the dismal black hole of Delhi I emerged thinking that reform by the same old government is hardly a panacea for government's state of terminal decline. Next morning a story in the papers made me jump. Two functionaries of Mumbai's dabbawalla association "" the legendary 5,000-strong workforce that braves traffic and crowds to deliver two lakh lunchboxes "" had been invited by the Indian Business School in Hyderabad to give young MBAs a lecture on how they perform this feat every working day virtually without error.

Although semi-literate, the dabbawallas of Mumbai have been given a Six Sigma performance rating by Forbes, that's a 99.99999% rate of success. And they have been going about their business since 1890 when the British introduced the practice of tiffin box deliveries of home-cooked food in offices. The dabbawalla's leaders were disarmingly modest. They said they understood little of Sigma ratings in international magazines: their main concern was the welfare of their 5,000 workers and two lakh customers.

Here is a brilliant home-grown and widely applauded model of how perfection can be achieved in delivering simple, customised services for a reasonable fee. Why can't paying house tax or any municipal service be made as simple, rather than make both parties endlessly suffer?

Why can't our cities hand over their corporations to the dabbawallas of Mumbai?