Post-haste

With its unmatched reach, the post office can shape itself to become the ideal delivery vehicle for several new national agendas

After years of piecemeal attempts at modernisation, the Indian department of posts appears to have gone about the task the right way — employed the strategy consultancy McKinsey to say how it should reinvent itself when the importance of the private letter is going down. As a result, the department now has a standard format for its post offices, including what kind of furniture it should have and, far more important, what kind of computer hardware and software it should have along with connectivity. At the core of this new set-up will be a national data centre which should give the country’s postal network the same type of interconnection as branches of large banks. As part of this renewal exercise the post office now has a new logo. Considering the hope and expectation that the re-branding strategy will create, it is vital for the organisation to deliver on the promise it is implicitly making. To do so it should look forward and not back. It is to be hoped that the mandarins concerned have given up their misguided attempt to push through legislation to reserve postal articles below a certain weight for the public sector.

The good news for the post office is that there are several new national agendas for which, with its unmatched reach, it can shape itself to become the ideal delivery vehicle. There is now a plan and goal to spread financial inclusion so that every individual, no matter how poor, can have a no-frills bank account to enable him to receive wages under employment guarantee programmes and loans under micro-finance initiatives. It is also the government’s aim to take e-governance into every corner of the country so that IT can be used to deliver what has to be obtained from the government both effectively and cheaply. For this, it is necessary for the post office not just to have modern layout, furniture and computers but also the necessary skills and, most importantly, autonomy.

Revamping a mammoth organization and re-orienting its staff are monumental tasks which cannot and will not be completed overnight. Successful execution will need sustained effort on many fronts over many years, which therefore means that people in the organization should have bought the need for change and accepted the direction in which the organization is moving. All this is work cut out for the postal department itself, and cannot be undertaken by consultancies. What might encourage a focused approach to the task is the realisation that there is simply no alternative, that the subsidies will not continue for ever, and therefore that the sooner change happens, the better it will be for all concerned.