Dear Comrades,
KOLKATA: Remember the fiasco over the 'Harmad Bahini' letter that Union home
minister P Chidambaram had sent to Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee around Christmas last
year? The registered mail took a week to reach Writers' Buildings from South
Block, causing a major embarrassment to India Post.
A year later, a slew of measures involving both man and machine are under way
to prevent a repeat of the snail mail episode that left everyone foxed.
Addressing the long-standing issue of manpower shortage that severely affected
operations like mail delivery, 328 persons have recently been employed, ending
years of recruitment freeze.
"We expect to employ more than 100 persons in the next year. There are some
vacancies that remain due to lack of suitable candidate to fill up some quotas.
But the acute manpower crunch will be a thing of the past soon," said B V
Sudhakar, postmaster general (business development) of West Bengal circle.
The long-term freeze had led to major crunch in postmen, resulting in
once-a-week delivery of mails in some post office areas in the city. This led to
major problems with credit card and other bills reaching customers after payment
date.
Another senior official said part of the problem was also due to the poor
work culture in Bengal where people arrive late to work and leave for home
early. To address this problem, an initiative is under way to mechanize as much
of the system as possible.
"An automated mail processing centre is being set up near the airport to
expedite postage delivery. The machine will be installed in next month and the
centre should function full-throttle from April," said VK Gupta, PMG (mail
management).
The imported Siemens
machines - one for small letters and another for bigger packages - will be
fitted with optical character reader capable of reading addresses and barcodes
and sorting the mails to 280-odd bins, each meant for one delivery office. There
are around 159 delivery post offices in Kolkata alone.
"The machines have an accuracy of 90% with printed addresses and 15-20% with
handwritten ones. Those that are not recognized will move into a separate
conveyer belt from where people can sort the mails through video monitors. The
machines will be able to sort 8 lakh letters daily," Gupta said. To begin with,
the system will be used to handle high value business mails.
In addition to this, work is underway on Tech Seva, a service that will
enable faster delivery of registered mails, Speed Post parcels and money orders.
Through this system, a postman will be able to send an SMS alert to the
addressee when a mail arrives for delivery at the post office.
"We are working on the database and may take six to eight months. But once
the system is in place, it will be of huge convenience to the addressee as they
can either be present at home to collect the mail or get in touch with the post
office to do so," explained Gupta.
