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The painstaking modernization of a Mumbai post office
Inside a Mumbai post office a blogger finds a bribe-free, computerized zone albeit with a few amusing anachronisms
Mumbai's beautiful General Post Office building near the main CST train station, downtown Mumbai.How many of us can say we've been into a post office in the last month? What about the last six months? Do you even know where your nearest post office is? Ever since email, most of us have had little reason to enter one of these bastions of basic communication. Yet in Maharashtra post offices are still a seminal hub for many Internet-less people. A typical rural post office serves 5,127 people and an urban post office 35,324 people according to Deepa Krishnan, who has uploaded a photo essay at mumbai-magic.blogspot.com on the subject.
And she finds many post offices are rapidly trying to catch up with modernity. "Of the 155,035 post offices, 2,500 have completed what the India Post calls "Modernisation (Improving Ergonomics)" and an impressive 10,000 post offices have been computerized," Krishnan discovers.
Yet the efforts of the post offices are only partially complete, showing how slowly this kind of modernization has come, and is still to come, to India.
While "Please do not pay bribe" boards, plus an updated 2008 Indian Post Office logo and computers are new features, you still find the mustachioed old babus (clerks and officials) manually entering digits into their big ledgers with a patented patience, sari clad women queuing to redeem their postal savings schemes and the odd sealing of the package with wax. As one commentator put it, "Oh yes the Indian Post office ..... there are still some which look exactly like from the Malgudi days."
