While Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been stressing on leveraging the Indian postal department calling upon citizens to use postal services for their benefit, the negligent working of the postal department puts a question mark on just how reliable is the postal department and raises concerns of the loss and harm that people suffer due to lapses in the postal service.
A case in point is the latest blunder by Dehradun’s postal service in which the National Sorting Hub (NSH) at the Clock-Tower situated head post office lost an entire bag containing 152 speed-post articles due to negligence, causing distress and loss to the senders and receivers of these speed-posts from across the country. For example, one of these 152 articles that the NSH at Dehradun Head Post Office lost without a trace was a life- saving medicine of a stage- four cancer patient whose family suffered much agony and loss as they made rounds of the post office to collect the medicine when it failed to arrive on the scheduled date. Such is the sorry state of affairs that at the post office, the staff was not even aware that some speed-post articles were lost.On being questioned by The Pioneer about the lost article two days after it went missing, the staff including the Senior Postmaster Dehradun GPO, JP Semwal was completely unaware that they had lost some articles and was absolutely clueless about where the missing speed-post article was.
Even while the Modi government stresses on promoting Digital India, e-governance and digitisation of services, the Dehradun Post Office staff had no record of where an entire bag containing 152 articles had been sent.On Wednesday, a good two-days after the article was lost, the Senior Postmaster along with other staff at the head post officeafter being put to the question by this correspondent could be seen manually searching for the missing bag in the post office premises in a random manner rummaging piles of bags to no avail, like a group of children playing treasure hunt without any clues.
Unable to trace the missing bag of 152 articles, Semwal initially tried to shirk his responsibility when questioned but on being reminded that he was in-charge said, “We are not able to find out where the entire bag is and I have no answer as to why can we not find it.” When asked about who would answer where the bag was, the Senior Postmaster’s reply was, “Samay bataayega ( time will tell ). I have no answer as to why it happened.”
When this matter was reported to the Senior Superintendent- Post Office, Dehradun division MC Pandey on Thursday morning, he pulled up the officers concerned and gave verbal orders to locate the lost bag at the earliest. Finally it was at 4 PM on Thursday after this intervention, that Dehradun Post Office found out that the bag was in Rudraprayag and that the bag did not have the mandatory labelling. It was recalled and reached Dehradun Post Office around 8 PM on Thursday.
And in all of this, people who had relied on postal services suffered as their speed-posts containing urgent mails got delayed.
As admitted by a post-office employee who wished anonymity, “Such lapses at the post office are not rare even though people use services like speed-post for urgent matters where mostly time is of crucial importance. And it is a big failure that these important articles are lost without a trace and for days the staff concerned does not even realise this lapse. These speed-posts commonly contain time-bound interview call letters, urgent documents, medicines etc and people relying on this service stand much to lose by such negligence.”
And as to why had the bag been sent to the wrong city, Semwal said, “It was dark at around 4 AM on April 24 that the post office employee put the bag in the wrong vehicle and the bag’s label also didn’t hold so it reached Rudraprayag. It was only on opening the bag in Rudraprayag that the bag could be traced and returned to Doon head post office.” And why are proper light arrangements not made at the post office is a question that remains unanswered. Asked what action he would take against those responsible for this lapse so that such blunders can be avoided in future, Semwal said that he would issued a warning to the employees concerned. Asked the same question, Pandey said that he would conduct an enquiry into this matter and take action against those responsible for this lapse. One cannot but harbour doubt if adequate corrective measures will be undertaken, in the absence of which people who rely on Indian Postal Services for urgent communications risk suffering in many ways.
