After an early wake up, we safely arrived in Mumbai. Mumbai, also known as Bombay (the Portuguese name of the city), is a city with more than 20 million inhabitants and less cows, goats and sheeps compared to Baroda. It is remarkable that the Victoria Station (railway station in Mumbai) is used by approximately 10 million people per day and only has 4 platforms, whereas Zurich has 24 platforms with barely half of the people commuting. More exciting and unbelievable are the «Dabba Wallahs», which is a distribution system for food, where wives are cooking lunch for their husbands at work. The Dabba Wallahs pick up the food from the housewives and brings it to a collecting place, where the food is being sorted and delivered to their husbands by another Dabba Wallah. AMAZING how it works (they work with only numbers and symbols). Absolutely remarkable is, that the Dabba Wallahs are always in time considering that they deliver around 200’000 meals a day.
In the afternoon we visited Novartis Research Development Center and had an interesting meeting with the CEO of Novartis India, Mr Ranjit Shahani. He showed us the opportunities and challenges of the pharmaceutical industry all over the world and its future. He furthermore gave us a insight into his daily schedule and mentioned that he strictly differentiates between his private and his business life (e.g. no business E-.Mails at home).
We are looking forward for the upcoming five days in Mumbai.
Eveline Bertschi, Christian Bader, Axel Schilling
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