With e-tailing rapidly catching customers’ fancy and likely to corner a major share of the retail business in India in days to come, the India Post has woken up from its deep slumber to grab a golden opportunity to revive its sagging fortunes. It is now in an advanced stage of talks with e-commerce giants like Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal to offer its expertise in handling their huge logistics.
It has pitched itself as a cheaper and “more effective” replacement for the costlier private courier services engaged by the e-tailers. While the department will transform its major and minor post offices as “parcel hubs” in major cities, its total 1.55 lakh post offices across the country are also all set to witness an infrastructure and technology upgrade with investment of Rs4,900 crore.
Talking to The Pioneer, John Samuel, Member (Operations)-Postal Services Board, Department of Posts, said Prime Minister Narendra Modi has talked about digital India and we are ready for the vibrant role to play in e-commerce which ultimately requires physical delivery.
“World is changing, India is changing and so will the postal services change in coming days. Keeping in view the greater demand of such a business and interest of Indian middle class to shop online and the response it received last week, currently Indian postal department is in talks with Flipkart, Snapdeal and Amazon to become their logistics partners. We will take over about 60 per cent of the e-tail business logistics as only we can boast of the largest parcel infrastructure for delivering articles to the appropriate doorstep,” said Samuel.
According to Assocham, the unorganised retail sector is estimated at $550-600 billion, while the organised retailers corner a market of about $25-30 billion. In comparison, the e-commerce sector is just about $3-4 billion.
“Given the kind of enthusiasm both on the part of the e-commerce players and consumers, the sector holds a great promise of generating $15-18 billion in the next three years. What is noteworthy about the e-commerce phenomenon is that it is attracting a lot of first generation young entrepreneurs besides the global players like Amazon and e-Bay showing great interest,” said DS Rawat, Assocham Secretary General.
The Indian Postal Department is eyeing the substantial volume of the parcels being transported as part of e-tail business. It has its plans cut out: Transform major and minor post offices as parcel hubs to meet the demands and install Automated Mail Processing Centre (AMPC) for faster delivery of consignments in major cities like Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore, Kolkata, Mumbai, Jammu, Hyderabad and lucknow.
“Our aim is to deliver articles and consignments with great dedication and at a great speed right from the warehouses to the door step of addressee,” said Vineet Pandey, Chief General Manager, Business Development and Marketing Directorate, Department of Posts.
Keeping in view the ever-growing size of e-commerce, more facilities of AMPCs with letter Sorting Machines (lSM) and Mixed Mail Sorter (MMS) are expected to be developed.
These sorting machines utilise optical character recognition --- video coding system that can read the address written on the mail and sort them for correct destination within seconds. While the lSM has a sorting speed of 33,000 letters per hour, MMS can process 18,000 ordinary as well as registered and Speed Post letters, packets and small parcels per hour. “Such state of the art modernised machines will be economical for either partners and will be value for money both for our corporate and bulk clients as well the customers,” said Vasumitra, Chief Postmaster General, Delhi Circle.