The Backlog
June 2020. Mumbai was in full COVID lockdown. Staff had returned to their hometowns overnight — shipments were stacking on the floor with no data in the system and not enough manpower to process inbound volumes. On-time delivery had collapsed to 10%. SLA penalties were accumulating, the client relationship was at risk, and the branch's operational credibility was on the line. No directive came down. The call was mine.
There was no playbook — nobody had built one for this. But one detail changed everything: my branch covered a dense network of government offices and restricted localities where only authorised persons could enter. Standard couriers were being turned back at checkpoints — there was no way in without an existing access pass or recognised local authority. I grew up in one of these areas and knew first-hand how that access worked. If we could find vendors who already had that authorisation, we could deliver where no conventional last-mile network could reach. That was the unlock. We moved immediately.
If we could find vendors who already had authorised access to restricted government localities, we could deliver where no conventional last-mile network could reach.
Standard couriers were being turned back at checkpoints. The access existed — it just wasn't visible to anyone who hadn't lived and worked inside those areas.
Before Day 1, we sourced vendors with existing access to government localities — people already operating inside the restricted perimeter. We briefed them on the work, negotiated per-shipment rates (COVID meant everyone needed income; pricing was fast and fair), and arranged official movement passes so their routes wouldn't be stopped at checkpoints.
Day 1: Started with letters and documents — lightweight, low-risk, a live test of the network. Each vendor took ~100 shipments. It worked. Government employees were absent, so we delivered to security personnel and got sign-off from leadership to proceed.
Days 2–3: Scaled to 300–400 documents per vendor per day and cleared the full document backlog.
Day 4: The harder problem — larger parcels destined for government offices and residential addresses. Called recipients directly. Most asked for return to origin; for the rest, security-personnel handover was approved. For residential shipments, we brought in vegetable and newspaper vendors already making daily rounds through the same streets.
Days 5–7: Cleared all remaining shipments and closed every pending CRM ticket. Tracking ran on DRS sheets — the vendors knew the localities better than any routing algorithm.
150,000 shipments cleared in 7 days with 40–50 people. On-time delivery recovered from 10% to 70% — some RTO was unavoidable given government offices remained shut, but the alternative was 0%. SLA penalties were halted. The operation ran without a single directive from above.
The result led directly to my promotion to Branch Manager of one of DTDC Mumbai's highest-volume branches — within months of the incident. That is the market's verdict on the work.
Informal access networks outperform formal logistics infrastructure when formal systems fail — and the person who maps those informal networks before the crisis is the one who resolves it after. I didn't know I was building that map. Six years in that branch had already done it for me.
The tactical note: work in blocks. I didn't try to solve 150,000 shipments at once — I solved letters first, then documents, then parcels, then residentials. Structure beats firefighting, even when everything is on fire.
