Community letter boxes may help deliver justice to the many “Nayanas” of this country
The Sunday Times of February 26 published under the headline, “No postman no University admission” an incident of a student Nayana Sanjeewanee who was eligible for admission to the university being deprived of her opportunity, due to receiving the letter informing her to register with the UGC, after the deadline for registration as she lives in a village where letters are not delivered by a postman.
This is an issue affecting thousands of people in villages and rural communities like Thelawilla in Suriyawewa. It happens in all parts of the country including some areas of Colombo city itself. There could be many more Nayana Sanjeewanees deprived of opportunities to gain admission to universities; deprived of securing employment due to missing job interviews, all because they don’t have pastal delivery where they live.
The Postal Department needs to find a solution to this problem. It is the legal obligation and the social responsibility of the Department to deliver letters to all citizens of the country without exception.
It is true a high cost needs to be incurred to expand delivery service to each and every house in the country. “Home Delivery” is a high cost service for any postal service. Other countries use “Community Letter Boxes” instead of individual “Home Delivery” to reduce cost and at the same time provide letter delivery to the people.
A Community Letter Box is a cluster of about 20 to 25 small letter boxes (6” x 6” inches in size as seen in picture) put together. Each small box with lock and key serves as the personal letter box of those residents in the house it is assigned to, and they are in possession of its key.
One Community Letter Box, or more than one at each location is installed in as many locations as required, easily accessible to the people they are assigned to. They can come and collect letters from their assigned letter box at their convenience at any time of the day or night, 24/7, similar to banking at an ATM. The “Home delivery” points in a community of 250 houses are thereby reduced to only 4 to 5 Community Letter Box ‘delivery points’. Postal services in some countries use this system in rural areas only, while others use it in semi-urban and urban areas as well to reduce cost.
The Postal Department can use this system successfully to facilitate letter delivery to villages currently deprived of same, at a minimal cost. A person from the village can be employed by the Postal Department to get the letters from the Sub Post Office and drop them into correct letter boxes (numbers need to be assigned to houses, and the letter boxes numbered accordingly), once a day for five days a week. Registered letters or other postal article needing the recipient’s signature can be kept in the Sub Post Office and a notice posted in the recipient’s personal letter box for him/her to collect at the SPO. This system can similarly be extended to semi-urban and urban areas to relieve postmen of their workload or increase the extent of their delivery beats.
The reduction in mail volume during the last ten years, according to Postal authorities is 36%. Accordingly, the number of letters received by a person in 2005 that stood at 25 per person had declined to 16 per person by 2015. The Postal Department needs innovative measures to face this challenge.
The Postal Department can also use the Postcode system which is used by over 75% of the postal services around the world to reduce cost in mail operations. The postcode system can be used in both manual and mechanical mail sorting. This system identifies the “Mail Routes”, “intermediate sorting offices” and the “delivery office” by five or six numerals. The existing system needs a letter to be sorted three to four times before it reaches the delivery office. It can be reduced to one to two times by adopting the Postcode and simplifying the whole process of mail sorting, thereby reducing the sorting time and cost and increasing efficiency.
The Department initially attempted to adopt the system in 1997 but it has not been successful due to some difficulties. Surprisingly the Postal Department appears to have given it up. Since then, so far for the past 20 years a new Post code has not been adopted. Raja Wickramasinghe Via email