COVID-19 has reiterated the importance of India Post

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In an increasingly wired world, it was written off as a relic and ignored until the pandemic hit and turned things around. Now, in the new age of social distancing, the world is slowly rediscovering the necessity of the all but forgotten postal service.

Nowhere is this being more clearly felt than in the United States where a raging political debate is happening over the course of its future. On the one hand, the pandemic has revealed just how much the country depends on the US Postal Service. On the other hand, cratering mail volumes further due to low business volumes, it is threatening to wipe it out. Making matters worse for the country is US President Donald Trump’s reluctance to bail the service out, at a time when it is gearing up for a historic election set to be heavily reliant on in-mail voting.

If the humble postal service is serving the larger goal of sustaining democracy in the US, in India, where it works as a bank, pension fund, primary savings instrument and delivery service, it is doing the job of literally saving lives.

Since the beginning of lockdown on March 23, the service successfully leveraged its network of 1,54,000 post offices to help poor Indians access everything from cash benefits to lifesaving medicines, when all transport and services came to a standstill.

According to data from Department of Posts, the service conducted 8.8 crore Post Office Savings Bank (POSB) transactions worth ₹1.53 lakh-crore, 3.8 crore India Post Payments Bank (IPPB) transactions worth ₹9,166 crore, and processed 801,000 money orders worth ₹857 crore by mid-June.

Through the National Road Transport Network that it developed when the lockdown began, postal employees also delivered more than 2,000 tonnes of life saving medicines and medical equipment, including PPE kits and ventilators to both medical labs and citizens living in the remotest parts of the country.

It was the postal service’s vast rural network that helped millions access their pension payments and social benefits, when the economy shut down during lockdown. In Telangana, the India Post helped disburse Asara Pension Payments worth ₹1,293 crore to around 5.6 million beneficiaries. In Karnataka, around 7 million divyangjan, old age and widow beneficiaries received pension payments through money orders worth around ₹600 crore at their doorsteps.

Essential to India’s needs, on account of its vast network and last mile connectivity, the Indian Postal Service has been in need of reforms for decades now.

Since the mid-Sixties, the service has been suffering from revenue deficit year-after-year, with the net postal deficit growing by 1,632.8 percent from Rs 91.81 crore in 1992-93 to Rs 1,590.97 crore in 1998-99. This year, the service has posted its highest-ever loss of Rs 18,255 crore — that also happens to be the highest clocked by any public-sector entity.

Of the postal department’s expenses, salaries and pensions constituted more than 90 percent of the gross expenditure, with dependence on manpower, instead of technology resulting in the service’s manpower cost rising steadily.

To be clear, the government is aware of the issues plaguing the service, and has tried resolving them by launching different projects from the years. For example, seeking to synergise technology, banking and postal services, it launched Project Arrow in 2008, to modernise Indian Post and run it as a pan-India network. The project, however, went into limbo, getting entrenched in bureaucratic hurdles and delays, lending the whole reform process ineffective.

More recently, the government announced setting up of India Posts Payment Bank (IPPB) by merging 14,000 branches of 45 regional banks with the postal service — a move many have said could be beneficial if the government implements it swiftly.

Implementation is key, because as the last decade has shown, it’s at this stage that plans for reforming postal service seem to get stalled. The problem, though, isn't a lack of resources, or knowledge, or even investment. Much of that exists in the government’s plans on paper.

The real issue seems to be a lack of serious intent on pushing through with the plans, driven by the faulty attitude that led the post to be relegated as a side service for decades in the first place — the view that the post isn’t a necessary service, or at least not important enough to deserve comprehensive reforms.

It’s obviously a misguided view, because it grossly underestimates the value and power of a service that has been the backbone of India’s communication network for the last 150 years, and that holds the potential to power India's financial services, through its vast network coverage, in these tough, turbulent times.

The trouble is that the government still thinks that the post is a service that it can afford to neglect. COVID-19 has revealed many bitter truths, one of them is just how costly this assumption can be.

Shikha Sharma is a New-Delhi-based independent journalist and photographer. Twitter: @ShikhaSharma304. Views are personal.