There was a time that belonged to letters. Remember that time when our eyes longed for the postman who carried a bag full of letters and walked towards us with a nice smile that satisfied our anticipation. We never got bored with writing them and never got bored reading those which our friends and relatives wrote to us. Gone are those days. Technology has brought the wind of change. Inlands and postcards are just debris of the past and today they have taken the form of SMS and E-mails.

How many utopias have we shared in ours letters? How many hopes, promises and regards? Some of us still keep those letters in our precious collections, don’t we? In those letters, we shared relations more intact than those in the real world. There were much more unsaid in the words we packed together in our letters. My mom often says that she had written more in the form of letters rather than notes when she was in college. Today’s generation hardly know its charisma, the flavour of goodness it brings with it. These days, when I see those red post boxes hanging around the corner, I am overwhelmed by a sense of nostalgia. – a long lost time that is never going to revisit us.

Postal service in India has gone through a metamorphosis. But not in a good way though. Leave alone the beauty of letters, the postal service severely fails to keep its business running these days. We have missed out on several chances and scope for improvement compared to the postal service in countries like U.K, where the department has grown appropriately with change in time and technology. In fact, U.K is a nation where people still love to write letters in spite of all the technological advancements. Royal Mail, the government owned postal service in the United Kingdom has met the growing challenges in such a way that no other courier service or logistics firm is able to challenge their reach or authentic service.

Under the Post Office Act 1969 in U.K, the General Post Office was changed from a government department to a statutory corporation, known simply as the Post Office. The office of Postmaster General was abolished and replaced with the positions of Chairman and Chief Executive in the new company. During the 1980s both British Telecom and Girobank were split off from the Post Office and sold, however the postal service’s section remained in public ownership as privatisation of this was deemed to be too unpopular. After a change of government in 1997, the Labour administration decided to keep the Post Office state-owned but with more commercial freedom. In 2002, the organisation adopted the name of the letters delivery business, becoming Royal Mail Group with operating divisions such as Royal Mail, delivering letters, Parcelforce, delivering parcels and Post Office Limited, managing the nationwide network of post office branches as retail outlets. They have all their operations computerized and everything has been so transparent with the general public.

As far as Indian postal service is concerned, the changes are yet stuck in papers. The Government has approved the IT modernization project of the Department of Posts for computerization of all its Post Offices, Mail Offices, Administrative and other Offices, establishment of IT infrastructure and development of software applications but the change is yet to be fulfilled. With proper planning and implementation, let us hope to at least see the red post boxes remain hanging on the walls and tree trunks, which are the beautiful reminiscence of a time –a time of words and letters that expressed a thousand meanings.