Dear Comrades,
The
postman’s knock on sleepy afternoons was an event of some importance in
Indian towns not long ago. It meant that either a money order or a
registered post had arrived. Since the advent of the electronic age,
however, the importance of the world’s most widely distributed postal
service with more than 1,50,000 post offices has declined. Seeing how
e-mails and the private courier services were making inroads into the
324-year-old postal business, Indian Post introduced innovations like
the speed post, e-payments of telephone, electricity and other bills,
and even spruced up some of the post offices, which used to have the
typically cheerless ambience of public sector organisations. But, the
decline has continued.
It is just as well, therefore,
that the authorities have decided to use postal employees for various
other services, including data collection from small shops to help in
the compilation of figures relating to inflation. Since post offices
were not only engaged in sending and receiving letters and parcels, but
also acted as banks and provided financial services such as savings
schemes like the public provident fund and the vikas patras, the
employees are well versed in various occupations — all of them calling
for meticulousness and integrity.If they now take up other duties
as well along with the existing ones, the services will acquire a fresh
lease of life and perhaps even relive periods when the postal
department scored several firsts. These included setting up the highest
post office in the world at 15,500 feet in Himachal Pradesh, flying the
first airmail service on February 18, 1911, and establishing the first
floating post office on the Dal Lake in Srinagar. The dakiya is
the descendant of the ‘runner’, who carried mail from town to town
through the night braving thugs and wild animals in the days before the
railway network was well established. Since then, his life has improved —
and may improve further as his worth is realised.
http://expressbuzz.com/opinion/editorials/mails-may-dip-but-india%E2%80%99s-postmen-will-go-on/367609.html