Can’t remember the last time you received a letter by post? But that doesn’t mean post offices are out of work
POST AND PRESENT The friendly postman at work
Dekho ek dakiya aaya
Thaila ek haath mein laya
Pehna hai woh khaki kapde
Hath mein dheron chitti pakde
Add to the description a rickety bicycle and you resurrect a childhood memory of a postman. Naturally then, a recent promo on TV of a private telecom operator featuring village kids making paper boats out of inland letter cards (signifying their red
undancy) infuriates your sense of a precious past. So much so it prods you to find out whether in the age of ‘e-volution’, the postal department and the postman, part of our daily life those days, have really gone out of work. But quite interestingly, you find that the little red mailbox just got bigger, not long after you penned your last letter. And quite silently so.
As the number of personal letters began to decline heavily (50-60 per cent currently, according to the Department of Posts’ Book of Information 2004-2005) due to the advent of technology (read SMS, e-mails), our postal service looked inwards for a way out and came up with a bank of new services. And none seems to be anywhere near the term ‘snail mail’.
Rather, the day is perhaps not far when you would use your area post office as a full-fledged tech-savvy citizen service centre. For already, you can use your PO to pay electricity bills, mobile bills, traffic chalans, property and income tax, electronically transfer money not just to the last village but also to 185 other countries, dispatch e-mails and e-greetings to places with no Internet access, apply for a passport, post letters through the PC, send bulk mails to your clients and even paste ads on postal stationery. Also, you can now buy stamps with fragrances and might be able to use your photo as a stamp one day!
Wide network
A senior postal official says, “Every year, we deliver prasadam from Tirupati in bulk to many places in the North and the Ganga water to the South. Just the other day, a company asked us to despatch shirts in bulk. We not only
delivered them but did the packing too. There is a lot of possibility,” he says. But the biggest hitch for the department seems its long-established image of a letter pusher. “Perception is reality and that has not changed, sadly,” admits another senior official from the department.
The department had invested in six advertisements but has not been able to make much of a dent. “But what has worked for us is the trust people have in the system. Private courier services don’t have the reliability of an established network like ours. When it comes to doing the last mile, our postmen are dependable,” he says.
Long serving
Yet another point to note is the long-serving record of its employees. And because of these pluses, the officials emphasise, many courier companies worldwide have now been sold to postal departments. Take TNT, now owned by Netherlands Post, or say, Deutsche Post, which has huge shares in DHL.
Some courier companies are in touch with the Department of Posts to work together, particularly in the rural areas. That all its software is being developed in-house adds to its cost-effectiveness.
“We are continuously training people at our training centres. Our software is world class. Take Meghdoot. It is used in 40 countries.”
Even as you add this to your list, you hear that soon, railway tickets can also be bought at the PO.
And, talks are on with airline companies to sell tickets at the PO.
SANGEETA BAROOAH PISHAROTY
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