By Ravi Nitesh:
Receiving a letter; looking for the postman; these were experiences that were certainly enjoyed by all people before our generation. Regardless of rural and urban portfolios, people of all types and of all class used to share the same feeling and same happiness decades ago on arrival of the postman in their area.
Those who were illiterate used to go to a person who can read the letter for them. These things have several impact and effect on social structure. At many times, these things helped people form a bond, to provide easier communication, social bonding and to make a society in its real mean.
We experienced a sudden change after the revolution made in the virtual world of internet. Gradually in a decade, we forgot those ‘khaki’ clad cycle riders. Even today, many who are using internet frequently for communication purposes, can remember the days when they wrote essays on ‘The Postman’.
India Post has updated itself with the time, but in competition with courier services, our postal services lagged. Are the postal services not competent with other modes of physical transfer of letters/articles/goods such as couriers? Still lot of post offices in India are famous for their architecture. These have become antique pieces where people sometimes visit. We can see the grand building, high roofs, old styled fans, a special smell, lot of old files, old styled furniture, and yes, many slow hands and old faces. Customers also complain about irritating behaviour of post office personals.
Though, India Post tried a lot to update itself with times and in fact brought lot of new things that can be count for speed and value for money but in spite of this it is losing the charm. On analyzing the reasons, we can find that this decrease is not just due to launch of internet, but also due to lack in efforts of postal services in the most required awareness programs in creative ways.
It is World post Day today, which is celebrated on anniversary of Universal Postal Union (1874). It was declared as World post Day in 1969 with the purpose to create awareness of the role of postal services in everyday lives and in socio economic development of a country.
For India, postal services are still so relevant because most of the Indian population lives in rural areas, urban areas also have not received support of frequent internet connections, lack of electricity and many such reasons push India post to make its services better. In approximation out of 1,54,866 post offices of India, 1,39,040 are situated in rural areas as per Annual report of India Post. With this large network, Indian Postal services are placed with the world’s largest networks. To make its services better and speedy, government has provisioned to make all post offices IT (information technology) enabled. In this 12th Five year plan, these services will be made fully equipped at all post offices.
To help the upliftment of social schemes, government has collaborated the post offices with many schemes so that people can get benefits of this largest network. Wages of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme are also distributed through post offices in various circles. National Postal Policy was launched in Feb 2012. Also, a special course of Gramin Dak Sevak was launched by the government under NIOS.
With these up gradation, we can hope for the betterment of this service in future. As, its betterment will be effective in uplifting socio economic condition of society and the already built large network can be helpful in many more services.
Though we are not dependent on postal services for our general communication, but still we can have the best way to send articles through post. On the occasion of World Post Day, lets live a moment when we can write a letter and post it.
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