The humble Post Office

Postal services have played a very important role in my younger days because of my life as a hosteller in school. So during school days you wrote letters to your parents and during holidays it was letters to your friends. This week sitting in the thought bar it’s about the humble postal service which may be the thing of the past soon.

I came from a village by name Noorommavu , PIN 689589, ( see pic below) daily morning 10AM a person my name John used to carry a sealed mail bag ( see pic of brown mail bag below) on his head from the main PO 5 KMs away to ours , walking , on the way he used to he used to give me a shout out saying hey boy you have a letter today. The entire village knew him as Mail John and he knew who got letters and who did not, those days you could even go the PO and mail John will open his brown sealed bag of letters look for my letter stamp a black seal on it and give it to me straight rather than the postman deliver to my house after 2 hours. Mail Johns next job was to carry the out going mail to the main post office once again walking 5 Kms , in between 10 to 2 PM he will read the entire Malayalam Manorama news paper and also read out loudly letters for those who could not read and even write a reply on thier behalf.

HISTORY

The British Postal Museum claims the oldest functioning post office ( 1712) in the world is on High Street in Sanquhar, Scotland and in India it was first established on 31 March 1774 at Calcutta, followed in 1778 at Madras and in 1792 at Bombay. In 1661, postmarks were invented by Henry Bishop and were used by the London General Post Office. They were called Bishop's Marks and contained the day and month the item was mailed. The first issued postage stamp began with Great Britain's Penny Post. On May 6, 1840, the British Penny Black stamp was released. The Penny Black engraved the profile of Queen Victoria's head, who remained on all British stamps for the next 60 years.( See pic below)

HOW THE POSTAL SYSTEM WORKS

The Universal Postal Union, established by the Treaty of Bern of 1874, is a specialized agency of the United Nations that coordinates postal policies among member nations. , currently headquartered in Switzerland this agency standardizes shipping for its 191 member countries. Since 1969, countries have been required to pay terminal dues to destination countries as compensation for local delivery costs. In general, they settle on the exact amounts every quarter based on both weight and number of items shipped. (Before this system took hold, countries just assumed that mail volumes were about balanced.)

BIG EMPLOYER

Today the Indian post and telegraph employs about 450 000 people, running a deficit of Rs 15000 crores, something similar to Air India or BSNL but the government runs it as a public service. Countries like Singapore have privatized its postal department, SINGPOST is a public limited company listed in SGX (Singapore Stock Exchange) . You may want to know that DHL is the world's leading logistics company has over 380,000 people working for them in over 220 countries is actually owned by Deutsche Post ( see pic below)

POST OFFICE

The biggest asset of a post office is its vast reach to remote places, re-inventing itself will be the key to its survival, Japan's Post Office Bank has 24 000 branches and its major bank is headquartered in Tokyo The general Post Office was a major landmark in any city, The Fullerton Hotel Singapore is a five-star luxury hotel located near the mouth of the Singapore River was originally the General Post Office Building. Declining mail volumes ushered in by the electronic media is the main factor for the general decline in the usage of postal services.

MOBILE APP KILLED THE POST OFFICE

One could send a money order or order a book via VPP (Value Payable Parcel) and even book an international trunk call to a foreign country from a PO. You may want to know that a 3 minute phone call in 1980 to Bahrain from Kerala used to cost Rs 72 for a block of 3 minutes which is equal to about Rs 28000 in today’s prices. The internet and mobile phone apps are killing this great institution of over 300 years.