JOIN USLife at the big post office
A teenage boy, his younger sister, and their mother stood around in the huge, high-domed General Post Office (GPO) on Raj Bhavan Road in Bengaluru. A postal employee had disapproved of the way they had packed a parcel and wanted it redone. The family looked frazzled and annoyed.
Watching them from a distance, I could empathise. I have been to the post office just three times in my life. I have sent only one snail mail — a letter to myself, posted from my school to my house address as part of classroom activity. I am 23, and I was born after the advent of the Internet. The glory days of the Indian Posts and Telegraph Department were over by the time I could read and write.
I was now visiting a post office, the largest in Karnataka and the second largest in south India, with many questions. What happens today at the post offices? Are only senior citizens and government offices using postal services? Do people still have pen pals? How do postal delivery staff deal with Bengaluru’s notorious traffic? Do youngsters even come here, and if they do, how do they navigate through this old-world maze, this one sprawling across 55,000 sq ft?
Good but not ol’
I met Srilekha, one of the supervisors at the National Sorting Hub, a department that receives parcels and sorts them for delivery across the country. She woke me up from my ignorant stupor: “Whoever thinks post offices are dying should think again. We handle one lakh Speed Post documents and bulk parcels (50 kg and above) every day.”
She continued: Speed Post transactions at this post office shoot up to 1.5 lakh a day during festivals like Raksha Bandhan and Deepavali, and the daily volume has risen by 25% in the past five years. The Indian postal system reaches the remotest parts of northeast India, which private couriers can’t service, she said proudly. And India Post is cheaper than private couriers. A 50-250 gm package costs Rs 42 here as against Rs 100-Rs 250 with private companies, she pointed out.
Amid the sound of letters being stamped frenetically, Assistant Chief Post Master (ACPM) Amruthalingam told me about the Mail Delivery department, which services pincode 560 001, the central part of Bengaluru, that is. “We deliver 8,000 articles, around 5,000 Speed Posts, 3,000 registered posts and a thousand parcels every day,” he said. Bengaluru has 90-plus pin codes. They receive the most number of registered posts during the KPSC (Karnataka Public Service Commission) exam season, I learnt.
Chief Postmaster K Radhakrishna brought me up to speed on the strides in technology. “We now use stamp embossing technology (franking) and there is no need to buy stamps separately,” he said. To reduce the need for doorstep delivery, the department is conducting a pilot project on smart postal booking and delivery, for which, they will set up kiosks at malls and railway stations. The e-commerce portal of India Post will soon offer services on the lines of Amazon and Flipkart, he added.
With 560 employees, the GPO in Bengaluru still feels understaffed. “One person does the work of three sometimes. Even a staff strength of 1,500 will not be enough for the workload we have,” Radhakrishna said.
Overnight vans
Well-oiled machinery works round the clock. I got to see some of the operations.
At 7.55 am, a red postal truck from Mangaluru arrived at the backyard of the five-storeyed GPO building, just outside the National Sorting Hub. More than 50 plastic bags with tags like ‘Maharashtra Circle’, ‘Kerala Circle’, ‘Hyderabad Circle’ and ‘Coastal Circle’ were offloaded in the open. A couple of men from the department started taking the bags inside, shouting ‘opening’ or ‘forward’ to a woman sitting behind a computer at the door.
‘Opening’ bags contain articles for distribution within the city while the ‘forward’ bags carry articles in transit, meant for other cities and states. This process is one of the many to follow, and is called receiving.
The next step is opening. Sitting in a line, a group of people open the bags, take out the items and scan the barcodes on them. The items then go to the sorting team, which segregates them on the basis of their destination. Many hand-written addresses on these packages were neat and legible, and not a scrawl. I had imagined the art of writing by hand was lost.
After one more round of scanning, the closing team packs them back into bags, sticking labels indicating where they must reach. These bags are forwarded to the dispatch team for the final step in their indoor operations, twice a day, at 6 am
and 12 pm.
An hour later, Amruthalingam joined me at the Mail Delivery department. It is a large hall. We had just started talking when a postman asked everyone to assemble at a corner for a small celebration. They were ringing in a colleague’s 60th birthday, a few days before he was to retire, and a long-time employee’s last day at work. After the routine ‘Happy birthday to you’ and a speech by the retiring employee, slices of cake were distributed. Since I was the “guest of the house”, they gave me a generous portion.
After a break, I noticed an employee stamping a huge pile of parcels waiting to be dispatched. The bell-shaped stamp he was using caught my eyes. It had metallic typefaces on the face, which, I was told, are manually changed and set every day to match the date (see pic below). The first stamp of the day is logged into an office notebook. The stamp was 150 years old, so was the ink pad kept on the table.
In this room, documents and parcels are sorted into postboxes (by pin code), and beat boxes (meant for big offices such as the Vidhana Soudha). There are 90 beats in the 560 001 postal code alone, up from 64 earlier.
Out they go
The postal delivery staff are the face of the system, going around the city on cycles and scooters from 8 am to 4 pm and chatting with people to whom they deliver letters and parcels. Some read out letters to unlettered recipients. Sometimes, they also perform the role of scribes, and write letters on request.
The GPO employs 96 postal delivery staff. Of them, 10% are female. I wasn’t surprised to see postwomen. My aunt Tara B K had worked as a postwoman in Bengaluru for about 30 years. She would talk about people feeling thrilled every time they received something by post. In recent years, only the arrival of a passport had elicited such cheer. As for my aunt, she took pride in how she knew the best doctors, engineers and shopkeepers on her beat!
One hazard postmen and postwomen face is aggressive street dogs. As for the postwomen, lack of good public toilets is a challenge. They say a creche at the office would make their work easier.
Varalakshmi, an award-winning postwoman who has worked for 32 years, said, “Back in the day, being able to afford sanitary pads was a luxury and finding good toilets during one’s period was a challenge. On such days, I took leave as it would get too tiresome to ride and walk around.”
Over the counters
After lunch, I decided to hover around the various counters to observe who came there. The GPO has a dedicated counter for armed forces personnel. And one for the differently-abled. Some traffic policemen had come in to see if they could open post office savings accounts. A big bunch of young customers were visiting to update their Aadhaar cards and send college-related documents via registered post.
Middle-aged and older people were out there in big numbers, at counters for savings certificates, postal life insurance, and speed and registered post. “Old people don’t trust technology like OTP authentication. They get frustrated if the servers are down. They like to get their passbooks physically updated,” a postal employee told me.
I spotted a man over 70, and it turned out he was waiting for his insurance agent. A retired ceramic engineer and an ardent letter-writer back in the day, he talks fondly about how the postal system inspired the writer in him. “I used to write to my family in Hassan frequently, describing the kind of place Bangalore was,” he recalled.
He hasn’t written a letter in a decade but still refers to letter-writing as an art. “People would write letters often so that they could hone different forms of writing, like poetry and prose,” he said.
He is proud of how his generation could remember names and numbers. “We used to memorise every bit of the address. Your generation depends on technology. One day, if all of these systems fail, what are you going to do?” he said.
I took that with a smile. Because I realised, , post offices today stand at the cusp of old-world communication and new-age technology.
Postal history in India
1296: Horse and foot postal system during the rule of Allauddin Khilji.
1672: ‘Mysore Anche’ was established by Maharaja Chikka Devaraya Wodeyar. Anche means post in Kannada.
1727: The East India Company opened its first post office.
1854: The Indian Post and Telegraph department (Post Office Act XVII) was launched.
1986: Speed Post introduced.
Sending a postcard would cost 1 or 2 annas in 1921, 5 paise in 1975, 15 paise in 2000 and costs 25-50 paise now.
Financial services at the post office
Postal savings account
Postal Life Insurance (now open to graduates too)
Sukanya Samruddhi (Savings scheme for girl children)
Doorstep banking using Aadhaar Enabled Payment System and biometric
identification.
Bill payment (For electricity, water, telephone)
Applying for a PAN card
Mobile and DTH recharge
Booking flight, bus and train tickets
What’s in, what’s out
My grandfather once wrote an inland letter to his children 14 days in a row, chronicling his trips around south India. Do people still use these blue letter-writing sheets?
Yes, said the chief postmaster. Small businesses would rather spend Rs 2.50 on an inland letter than get their matter printed on a postcard for Rs 6, he says.
Postcards are still in demand, thanks to ardent collectors like him. Thanks to
postcrossing.com, a unique website, strangers are able to exchange their postcards from around the world.
Philately, the study and collection of postal stamps, is also going strong as many youngsters have picked it up as a hobby, an employee at the Philatelic Bureau told me. Incidentally, a young graduate was waiting to apply for a membership, which gets people easy access to limited-edition stamps and envelopes as and when they are launched. The membership comes for Rs 200 a year.
On offer here are stamps of 15 and 25 paise, a Mahatma Gandhi stamp set for Rs 150, stamps perfumed with sandalwood, rose and jasmine, stamps paying tribute to Covid warriors and Indian soldiers from World War I, envelopes commemorating the pink ball Test matches and the singer Late Mangeshkar, they had it all. Usually, living people aren’t featured on stamps and envelopes, but cricketers Sachin Tendulkar and M S Dhoni are exceptions, an employee told me, pointing to commemorative envelopes released in 2021.
Documents, sweet boxes and gifts are most frequently sent by post today. Lost and found keys are also sent, but they are rare.
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