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Journalism of Courage
Eight uniformed men and women pore over a table. It’s the ‘opening table’ at the delivery wing of the New Delhi-110001 post office at Bhai Vir Singh Marg, where, at six in the morning, India Post sacks pour forth a mountain of letters. Darting practiced fingers back and forth between letters, Premvati stacks them with the stamped face up. She cannot read, but 17 years on the job have taught her to tell a postcard from a greeting card and a personal letter from business mail. As the morning mail squeezes through the high-speed stamp cancellation machine, a team of 18 sorters is all geared up to classify it into 66 ‘beats’ that fall under New Delhi-1. When the 66 postmen come in at 9 am — an hour before they go out to deliver the post, fog or not — they will be greeted by their respective wooden slots full of mail.
Come holiday season and there is a cheerful spike in the quantum of mail, largely due to greetings posted in bulk. As the year draws to a close, it is time for postmen to go into overdrive. On a regular day, the postmen at the New Delhi-1 office must deliver 50,000 articles — during Christmas and New Year, up to a lakh — to their destinations. There is a rhythm to the business of communication at the delivery branch: it functions like clockwork. And the cogs and wheels like to hold on to their anonymity. Officers politely decline to be quoted and postmen answer without looking up from their desks, all eyes on their work. They are the bearers of ‘unaccountable’ mail, as opposed to Speed Post and registered post, but that doesn’t make them shrug off responsibility.
The senior officers say that while book post is Class-II mail per se, greeting cards are an exception: like letters, they are treated as Class-I mail, which means they are given priority during delivery. “The volume of personal mail is declining. Judging by the biannual counting of unregistered, delivered mail in post offices across the country, it has come down by 20 per cent in the past six years. The volume of greeting cards has plummeted by 30 per cent in the same period,” says a postal consultant to the UN, Vijay Bhushan, who retired as director-general of the Department of Posts and secretary to the Government of India in 2004.
Now, greeting card majors like Archies are trying to tap the festive mood by offering courier services.
Letters and parcels form 20 per cent of the market for communications now, Bhushan says, and this market has been invaded by couriers. “The monopoly of post is no longer tenable. Business mail is picking up worldwide, and India Post must concentrate on its Speed Post and parcel services to make the best of this trend,” says Bhushan.
So how can India Post be steered towards a larger market share? “India Post is turning customer-friendly. If you have three articles to be sent by Speed Post, we come to your doorstep to pick them up. The revenue from Speed Post has gone up from Rs 449.15 crore in 2006-7 to Rs 578.28 crore in 2007-8. We have Rs 17 crore savings in bank accounts. We are computerising post offices, e-post is picking up. We need a regulator and an integrated postal development plan. Most of all, we need to cut costs,” says Bhushan.
If the gap between cost and revenue is any indication, the postal machinery needs some serious tweaking. In keeping with the department’s raison d’être of universal service, the only viability requirement for setting up a post office is that it recover a minimum of 30 per cent of the establishment cost — this is further relaxed for hilly places. The department is the second-largest employer in India, with 1.5 lakh post offices and a 6 lakh-strong staff. Bhushan says, “We could use a bit of trimming. In Bihar, for example, there is hardly any work.”
Back at the delivery office, the argument for pruning the postal labour force seems inexcusable. Since the mid-1980s, recruitment has been minimal. Of the sanctioned strength of 432, the post office employs 281. And though snail mail is largely passé, there’s no dearth of work. “The volume may have dwindled, but colonies are expanding, and so are our beats,” says postman Parveen Kumar, who sits at desk number 45 and delivers to Kasturba Gandhi Marg. “After the Pay Commission’s recommendations, we get about Rs 14,000 a month,” he says.
At another desk, Bajrang Bahadur Singh cannot understand what the fuss is all about. He still delivers about 1,200 letters in a day, over two trips, to the political biggies on North Avenue. “The mails start dwindling as the term of the government draws to a close, but this time there’s no stopping them,” says the befuddled postman. And who gets the most mail? “Pranab Mukherjee. And Praful Patel,” he says.
