More than a hundred and fifty years old organisation, India Post is one of the giant departments of the government of India. With around 155000 post offices it is the biggest postal system in the world employing close to 500,000 people. A vast majority of the post offices ? approximately 130000 ? are located in the country's rural recesses and have been instrumental in letting in fresh air into the hinterland. Most were opened during the period of hectic expansion of postal facilities commencing around half a camiseta del fiorentina century ago under the department's commitment to provide to every single person access to basic postal services in a largely poor country at affordable cost ? a concept that goes by the name of Universal Service Obligation.
Providing a modicum of communicational facilities in areas that have so far remained untouched by the ever-advancing communication technology most of the rural post offices are, nevertheless, a drain on the public exchequer, highly subsidised as they are, especially those in the backward tribal areas. What is more, several postal products, such as prepaid envelopes, inland letter cards and postcards, are sold at much less than their cost-price for the sake of enabling use by the poor customers, making a further dent in government finances. Being a political decision one cannot, despite the illogic, have any quarrel with it, though the conscious policy makes the department financially sick, more so in the current era of plummeting mail traffic.
Even less than two decades ago one did not visualise the then imminent changes in what is now known as hard messaging system. The digital technology had displayed sufficient progress but none really expected that it would affect messaging profoundly enough to threaten the established way people were communicating and doing business. If it was so in the United States and other
The Post Office is practically nothing minus its mails, which despite its various other functions, is at the core of its business model; its unrelenting efforts to reach the received mail matter to the addressee in the quickest possible time was its core competence. That came under attack from what was yet an unlikely source. While couriers, legal and illegal, were nibbling away at its business, the Post Office, as a more-than-100-year-old government department, was a giant amongst dwarfs and hence did not have anything to fear from them. That the strides made with such great rapidity by the digital communication technology, particularly in a country that even in the closing years of the last century was not tech-savvy, would impinge on its core business was not anticipated by even the prophets of doom. None, curiously, saw the writing on the wall. And, yet slowly but inexorably that started happening.
The country saw convergence of IT and telecommunications with the help of the World Wide Web that acted as a midwife to an era of instant communications. To start with, it was electronic mail ? e-mail or Email in common parlance ? by which one could exchange messages containing text, images, camiseta del fiorentina and videos with multiple addresses. While e-mail was initially restricted only to those who had computers, either personal or in the office or in cyber cafes that proliferated, the cell phone put the means of instant communication into the hands of those who had just a pocket-sized handset. And, India has their owners in millions (850 million, to be more precise) and is still counting. It put in their hands the power of communicating and, in the new lingo, texting to all and sundry having a handset regardless of where one happened to be ? in an urban centre or a remote village. With the advent of "smartphones", technology put virtually a portable computer in the hands of the people with multimedia facility of sending and receiving e-mails and conversing over long distances. Once "cyberspace" became the medium of effective communication with the facility of reducing the message into a "hard copy" the conventional messaging had to take a hit.
And it did. The volume of mail traffic in India fell to 6,677.18 million pieces in 2006-07 from the figure of 15,749.30 million in 1997-98 ? a hit of severe proportions. Internationally too, there are clear signs of the Internet eating into postal systems. Developed economies, in particular, saw postal businesses slump and they slumped further with the onset of the 2008 recession. Statistics provided by the Universal Postal Union (UPU) show that between 2008 and 2009 domestic mail volumes were globally down 12 per cent. Obviously, the World Wide Web had a worldwide impact and India was not alone in losing its "bread & butter" business. Its mail volumes dried up making it somewhat of an insignificant player in the nation's economy. It had to downsize its mail establishment by stopping recruitment. Over a period of a decade and a half the lack of infusion of manpower told on its efficiency. At many places daily multiple mail deliveries were cut down to one and employment of casual workers for want of regulars was unable to lift its sinking image. Whatever mail it received ? mostly the documents, periodicals and other 2nd class stuff ? got delayed in delivery. Corporations, banks and other mailers, quite predictably, migrated to couriers further impacting the postal traffic.
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