Suraj Sharma
With over 154,965 Post offices, of which 139,067 are in rural areas of India, For over 15 decades, the Indian postal system had served and contributed in intensification and amplification of the communication services in the country. India post’ the largest postal network in the world’ has triumphed in connecting people across the country.
Despite the fact that India post’ is widely spread across the countryside, it also has anonymous chinks and loopholes. First and foremost, the post offices in the countryside are actually imperceptible and covert. There is no definite location of post offices in the remote areas. You can’t easily unearth and detect them. In several instances, it has found that the local postmaster has shifted the post office to his personal room. Also, they are occasionally available for work.
You may have bumped into a common contingency when your speed post’s expected delivery has delayed for epochs. The mail carrier in some remote areas doesn’t really attempt to collect the parcels and letters for weeks. De facto, in a recent occurrence, some despoilers used postal service for the transportation of imperilled parts of animals to overseas. It was reported that a clique of poachers were using
Indian postal services to send jeopardised Pangolin scales and lamella to Kolkata from where the parcels were sent to Nepal, Bhutan, China, Hong Kong, Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries. It’s genuinely hysterical and uproarious but at the same time a serious matter of threat. For a moment you can imagine how our postal system works and scrutinises the consignments at the checking points across the trail.
Not all consignments disseminating through India Post’s speed post are checked and scanned at the hub stations. All the parcels and consignments are booked directly by the staff of India Post thereafter, they restrain the consignments to the Inter circle hubs (ICS) and then dispatched for the destination pin code. As claimed by India Post, any official can check and scan the consignment of he or she found the article sceptical. But nobody genuinely cares.
It’s a major loophole in the postal system that poachers and other bootleggers Qui tacet consentit. India post can’t really depend on the airport’s security checks. section 6 of India Post Office act 1898 states, “The Government shall not incur any liability by the loss, mis-delivery or delay of, or damage to, any postal article in course of transmission by post, except in so far as such liability may in express terms be undertaken by the Centre as hereinafter provided; and no officer of the Post Office shall incur any liability by reason of any such loss, mis-delivery, delay or damage, unless he has caused the same fraudulently or by his wilful act or default.”
The officials may not inform you about the loss of your article or even bother to check the customer’s complaint. The delayed response and the onerous services is also a matter of concern. A customer having an undercurrent or temper of claiming the money for his lost package need to file a complaint with the consumer court. Though, the court’s loopholes need not to be discussed.
India post was not meant for making profits or contribute a bulk in the economy rather, it was authorised in order to serve the folks in countryside. But, we can’t really repudiate the facts that India Post is in enormous loss. Also, the employees working in the institution feel a lower self-esteem, as I have seen in certain instances. Having an inferiority complex may rummage through the workforce and encourage drudgery. Post offices have not been entirely digitalised since a few decades. Through this column, I urge the readers to discuss and question the government or the concerned emanate.
(The author is a student of English literature at Hindu College, Delhi University.)
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