Dabbawalas: The men who fed Mumbai - and are slowly disappearing

Dabbawalas, who deliver home-cooked meals, are leaving the trade as remote work and rising costs threaten their future.

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They load these boxes onto trains, cross the city and then spread out on foot and bikes to deliver hot, home-cooked meals to office workers.

After a short break, they do it all in reverse - collecting the empty boxes and returning them to the kitchens they came from by mid-afternoon.

These men are called dabbawalas and for more than a century they have kept Mumbai fed through a delivery system so precise it became world famous.

The lunchboxes - called dabbas - usually carry rice, lentils, vegetable curries, rotis (flatbread) and sometimes meat that is freshly cooked in homes across the city's suburbs.