They call themselves Maharajas — the king of kings — and even royalty has to meet them on their own turf.

So, Prince Charles met them at a Mumbai station, where they gather after day’s work. The dabbawallahs spared him all of 20 minutes.

“We were told that Prince Charles wanted to meet us and that we could visit him at a five-star hotel. We said our clients came first and we could not make them wait. Hence, whoever wanted to meet us had to do so when we got together after work,” recalled Manish Tripathy, director and chief information officer, Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Association.

It is not just Prince Charles who has rubbed shoulders with the dabbawallahs. While the prince invited them for his wedding with Camilla Parker-Bowles and enquired after them during the Mumbai floods, entrepreneur Richard Branson got down to doing the rounds with them.

Wearing a traditional white cap (not wearing one can result in a fine of Rs 100 by the association), Branson travelled on local trains, which form the backbone of the dabbawallahs’ service, to deliver lunch boxes to customers.

“If the going gets tough for Branson, we are ready to employ him as a dabbawallah,” quipped Tripathy.

While Branson has a shot at being a dabbawallah, even though he is not from the Vaikari sect from which most of them hail, Prince Charles, the association members feel, should become their brand ambassador.

“Not many knew of us till Prince Charles paid us a visit. He should be given a cut from our profit,” explained Tripathy.

The success of the Mumbai dabbawallahs, who, according to the Forbes Global Magazine, have been making as few as one error in six million deliveries over the past 100 years, has been studied at Harvard Business School. The Berkeley University in California teaches the logistics of dabbawallahs in their business management programmes.

On Monday, the dabbawallahs were at Vinod Gupta School of Management at IIT, Kharagpur, to meet a 40-member team from the University of Nebraska, Omaha, in the US.

Tripathy, who spoke on behalf of the dabbawallahs, floored the visitors by explaining the logistics of the system that functions almost without the aid of modern technology other than SMS. The association also runs a website for the benefit of clients.

“The lecture by Tripathy was engaging. We learnt about something that we never knew existed,” said Tiffany Ackerman, a student of Nebraska university.

For Andrew Elliot, another student of the university, it was the flat hierarchy that was unique. “The president of the association does the same work as the other employees,” he observed.

The American students are in India as part of an exchange programme with IIT, Kharagpur. The team will leave for Delhi on March 13. After four days there, they will head home.