What exactly is VivaLife manufacturing, and how might it connect to Raji and Mala’s business in Dabba Cartel?

Spoiler warning: this article discusses plot details from all seven episodes of Dabba Cartel.

Vivalife Pharmaceutical, the company where Raji’s husband Hari works, is under investigation for manufacturing Modella, a fictional fentanyl-based painkiller that has been diverted into the illicit drug market. FDSCO inspector Ajit Pathak (Gajraj Rao) leads that investigation, with company head Shankar Dasgupta (Jisshu Sengupta) as his primary target. The connection to Raji (Shalini Pandey) and Mala’s (Nimisha Sajayan) tiffin delivery business is not a direct supply chain. It runs instead through personal histories: Hari is a Vivalife employee, and Mala worked as a domestic worker in the Dasgupta household before she and Raji started their dabba operation together in Thane.

What Vivalife Pharmaceutical actually produces

Vivalife manufactures Modella, a fentanyl-based prescription painkiller, under apparent regulatory cover. Shankar Dasgupta runs the company, and inspector Pathak’s investigation centers on overdose deaths linked to that product. The show keeps the plant-level details of Vivalife’s operations deliberately vague. Pathak’s case is built around distribution records and overdose data rather than manufacturing evidence.

Shankar and his executives block Pathak’s inquiries throughout the series, a pattern that, in our reading, suggests the obstruction goes beyond standard corporate defensiveness. Whether Hari knows what Vivalife is concealing, and how far up the executive chain the criminal operation actually reaches, is one of the season’s central unresolved questions.

Modella, Mithai, and why the distinction matters

Modella is Vivalife’s pharmaceutical product, a fentanyl-based painkiller manufactured inside the company. Mithai is the street drug the women distribute, a blend of Modella and MDMA. The name references the Hindi word for sweets, and conflating the two misreads the cartel plot entirely.

The character who invents Mithai is not Shankar Dasgupta but his wife Varuna (Jyothika). Varuna learns about Tucibi, a real South American party drug, and models Mithai on the same logic: combine existing substances into a new product that existing distributors do not yet control. Sheila “Ba” Jagtap (Shabana Azmi) and her group adopt Mithai after they can no longer move plain MDMA without encroaching on the territory of drug lord Chacko Kurian (Sunil Grover).

Tucibi, known colloquially as “tusi” or “pink cocaine,” originated in Colombia around 2018. Toxicological analyses of samples consistently find ketamine, MDMA, and caffeine in the mixture. Dabba Cartel pulls that real-world template into a Mumbai context, replacing the Colombian supply chain with a Vivalife distribution channel.

How the tiffin business becomes a distribution network

The dabbawala tradition the women operate within gives the cartel its operational cover. In Mumbai and its suburbs, tiffin boxes move between thousands of households and offices daily, handled by delivery workers with longstanding, trust-based customer relationships. The show’s plot uses that social infrastructure: a home-cooked-food service run by middle-class women in Thane draws far less scrutiny from law enforcement than any conventional courier arrangement.

The drugs are moved inside the tiffin boxes. Someone connected to the operation begins using Raji and Mala’s kitchen and delivery network to shift product without the women’s initial awareness. Officer Preeti (Sai Tamhankar), who is investigating the Vivalife case alongside Pathak, discovers packets hidden on the premises, forcing Raji to confront that her business has been made into a vehicle for something she did not agree to.

Why Mala’s connection to the Dasgupta family is the structural hinge

Mala’s role as Varuna Dasgupta’s former domestic worker is the detail that most tightly binds the tiffin business to the Dasgupta family’s drug operation. Early coverage of the show described Mala simply as Raji’s business partner, which understates her position considerably.

Before starting the dabba service with Raji, Mala worked inside the Dasgupta household. Our reading is that she would have observed Varuna’s life and relationships at close range, long before either woman realized those relationships were criminal. That same Mala is now running a delivery network that Varuna’s drug creation moves through.

Mala’s boyfriend Santosh (Prateik Pachori), a street-level drug dealer, provides the second point of contact with the cartel. Her past employment connects her to the supply side; her present relationship connects her to distribution. The tiffin business sits at the intersection of both.

What the real-world parallels establish

Food delivery systems can plausibly conceal drug shipments at scale. In 2021, Bengaluru’s Narcotics Control Bureau dismantled a drug ring that had been using the Swiggy food delivery platform to move cannabis, with authorities intercepting individuals receiving drug-filled delivery boxes through the system. Investigators in that case noted that food delivery volume made individual shipments nearly impossible to flag without a tip. Dabba Cartel applies the same logic to a relationship-based tiffin service, where the personal familiarity between a delivery worker and her clients raises the social trust even further.

Creators Shibani Dandekar Akhtar, Vishnu Menon, Gaurav Kapur, and Akanksha Seda have described Dabba Cartel as original fiction, not based on real people or documented events.

Knowing that Varuna, not the pharmaceutical company itself, is the creative force behind Mithai reshapes the question this piece began with. Vivalife’s contribution to the cartel is a raw material: a controlled substance produced under apparent pharmaceutical legitimacy. The criminal value added, the step that converts Modella into Mithai and moves it into the underground market, originates in the Dasgupta household. That is where Mala used to work. The tiffin boxes are the last mile of a supply chain whose starting point runs through the same domestic setting she once operated inside.