MUMBAI -
Churchgate Post Office, August 2004: A sleepy Mumbai
mail house near Nariman Point, one of Asia's busiest
business zones. Dimly lit, with bits of white stamp
borders and blobs of green gum on a large writing table,
and staff with little to do.
Churchgate Post
Mall, circa August 2010: A bustling multi-purpose civic
utility where folks pay bills, conduct banking, send
mail, shop, book tickets, browse through a library and
eat cotton candy. Outside, postwomen deliver mail on
motorized roller skates.
India's Department of
Posts (DoP) may not yet be hatching all of those plans,
but it is certainly taking steps in that direction. As
in most developed markets, Indian post offices have
begun to offer new services such as insurance, bill
payment, loans and special touches such as the delivery
of temple prasad - the edible offerings made to
gods - and vibhuti, the sacred ash that millions
of Hindus receive after poojas (ritual-filled
prayers).
In Mumbai, the landmark Siddhivinayak
Temple in midtown Prabhadevi hosts a long daily queue to
worship teenage Ganesha, the popular pot-bellied,
elephant-headed god who is in charge of success and
overcoming obstacles. Ganesha matters a great deal to a
commercial capital such as Mumbai, and the post office
cashed in on this. A DoP scheme has devotees depositing
US$1.08 (Rs50) at any post office in the states of
Maharashtra (Mumbai is the state capital) and Goa. The
DoP then sources the prasad from the temple - a
package containing a photograph of Ganesha,
vibhuti, sacred thread, dry fruits and dry
coconut to munch respectfully.
At less exalted
levels, customers are able to develop Kodak film rolls
and pay their phone and electricity bills at post
offices. This month, the government-owned Oriental
Insurance company will hawk its polices through post
offices nationwide.
The DoP has also declared a
savings scheme for senior citizens with a 9% rate of
interest. Post offices have become India's - and
possibly Asia's - largest bank, with savings accounts
alone worth $65 billion. Maharashtra state has 1.63
billion post-office savings accounts, from mostly
low-income segments of the population.
India's
154,000 post offices, the world's largest postal
network, are an underestimated commercial octopus
penetrating deep into rural India, where more than 70%
of the population resides. With the rural market
becoming more attractive to corporate India, the
post-office network - connecting 634,321 villages and
4,689 towns - is a gold mine just waiting for
prospectors armed with innovative ideas.
"Companies such as Hindustan Lever have
approached us, wanting to sell consumer goods such as
soap through our rural post offices," Atul Srivastava,
postmaster general of the Mumbai region, told Asia Times
Online. "We are very interested, but at the same time we
need to have a synergy with companies with whom we can
work."
But suspicious trade unions first need to
be sensitized to a changing market reality. "I've had
some union members sarcastically ask me if we are next
going to sell dal [lentils] from our post
offices," said Srivastava. "But as mail volumes drop -
in Mumbai it dropped by 22% - our postmen too benefit
from additional businesses." So selling groceries might
not be a bad idea at all.
Across Asia, similar
stories of postal services being redefined are
unfolding. At the 11th Association of Southeast Asian
Nations Postal Business Meeting in Laos last month,
Laotian Vice Minister of Communication, Transport, Post
and Construction Sommad Pholsena said the postal
business is affected by many factors such as
globalization, trade liberalization, and rapid changes
in technology.
According to the Universal Postal
Union (UPU), a 190-country organization that India
joined in 1876, letter-post items have declined in
developing countries in the Asia-Pacific region. There
were 52.9 billion domestic service dispatches and
892,000 international dispatches in 2000. These figures
dropped to 51.6 billion and 717.5 million respectively
in 2002.
Worldwide, the number of permanent post
offices declined from 684,231 in 2000 to 651,371 in
2002. Total post items dispatched worldwide, both
domestic and international, dipped from 443 billion in
2000 to 430 billion in 2002. However, in a press release
last January, the UPU said domestic letter volumes and
international ordinary parcels are on the rise in many
countries.
As usual, Singapore showed the world
how to benefit from technology rather than be beaten by
it. SingPost, Singapore's postal network, has SAMs
(self-service automated machines) in more than 90
locations. These 24-hour automated post offices let
customers pay bills, fees, taxes and fines, weigh mail
packets, refuel cellular phone pre-paid cards, renew
memberships and licenses, and buy postage. People can
drop their HP or IBM products needing repair at SingPost
outlets and pick them up when ready.
Last
Wednesday, Japan Post announced that the Tokyo-based
retail chain Lawson Inc will handle its parcel service
from 7,821 Lawson stores nationwide. Japan Post, to be
broken up into four companies in a full privatization
process by 2007, has had its mailboxes available in
Lawson stores since last year, while Lawson has opened
its retail stores within Japan Post offices.
This month, Hong Kong Post recruited movie stars
Ada Choi and Joe Ma to promote e-Cert, an electronic
personal certificate that is embedded into the Smart ID
Card - the new citizenship ID card issued by the
Immigration Department. The Hong Kong Post e-Cert makes
online transactions safer for e-retailing, from banking
to online stock trading. Hackers could crack user
passwords, but logging in won't be possible without the
embedded e-cert.
Meanwhile, in an increased and
long-overdue social role for post offices, India's
Election Commission used Maharashtra Post this year to
register new voters for the forthcoming local assembly
election, after a ruckus over missing names in the
general-election electoral rolls earlier in the year.
Ninety-eight thousand new voters were registered.
DoP also launched "ePost" in January to let
those without Internet connections send and receive
messages or scanned images through e-mail services in
post offices.
Similarly, the Himalayan kingdom
of Bhutan has begun to use the Internet to offer postal
services to remote villages, cut off for about six
months of the year by a harsh winter.
But not
everyone is impressed with Asia Post Inc's makeover. At
the World Mail & Express Asia conference in
Singapore this month, key customers - including Reader's
Digest, The Economist, McGraw Hill, UNICEF (the United
Nations Children's Fund) and World Scientific - said
they felt post offices were offering new value-added
services without adequately analyzing and discussing
with the customer what they really need.
These
big customers felt that many new postal services were
half-baked in concept, mainly aiming to cut operating
costs. But essential core services invariably suffered,
they said. At stake was their current combined mail bill
of $66 million for sending an estimated 125 million
items within Asia.
Such basic issues could have
strategists heading back to the drawing board at the
2004 World Mail & Express conference scheduled to
take place at the Sheraton Towers, Hong Kong, on
November 16-17. Would people come to post offices
expecting more efficient mail delivery or to buy movie
tickets?
Postal chiefs are hoping both can be
possible. Srivastava agrees that new services may not
all be planned as thoroughly as they should be. "Out of
10 schemes, maybe only two might succeed," he said, "But
this is a beginning."
Raja M is an
independent writer based in Mumbai, India.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
