About Dabba Cartel
Dabba Cartel is a 2025 Netflix Indian Hindi-language crime dramedy set in the suburb of Thane, near Mumbai. It follows a group of ordinary middle-class women who run a home tiffin service, the everyday dabba delivery that carries hot lunches across the city, and who quietly find themselves drawn into a far more dangerous trade. What begins as a small domestic enterprise built around shared recipes and neighborly trust gradually doubles as the cover for a drug-trafficking operation, and the women must learn to keep two very different sets of books at once.
The heart of the series is its women-led ensemble and the wry comedy of the double life they lead. Shabana Azmi anchors the group as Sheila Jagtap, the steady matriarch the others look to, while Jyothika plays Varuna Dasgupta, a sharp former finance executive who brings a corporate eye to the operation, and Shalini Pandey appears as Raji Jagtap, a young chef and daughter-in-law whose kitchen sits at the center of it all. Around them, neighbors, in-laws, a watchful police presence and a tangle of family obligations keep pulling the women back toward the ordinary lives they are trying to protect.
Created by Shibani Dandekar Akhtar, Vishnu Menon, Gaurav Kapur and Akanksha Seda and directed by Hitesh Bhatia, Dabba Cartel premiered on Netflix on February 28, 2025 as a seven-episode limited run. The show treats its crime plot with a light, character-first touch, leaning on suspense, situational humor and the solidarity that forms between the women rather than on spectacle. Its appeal rests on a recognizable, lived-in domestic world suddenly tilted off its axis, and on a cast of acclaimed performers playing against the tidy expectations of suburban respectability.