Postal Efficiency

Postal efficiency, THE INDEPENDENT
From AP WORLDSTREAM, September 26th, 2001

POSTAL-EFFICIENCY sked Emerging Markets Datafile
September 26, 2001
THE INDEPENDENT
BANGLADESH
ENGLISH
Postal efficiency, THE INDEPENDENT
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Inefficiency of the postal department is one of the chronic and
apparently incurable problems of the administration. The question
is whether all of it is plain inefficiency. Perhaps it is not only
due to incompetence that books and magazines mailed to addresses
almost never reach their destinations. The more high-priced and
marketable a journal is, the less is its chance of being received
by the addressee. These are chronic irritants which were never
seriously dealt with. What is even more disgraceful is that stamps
valued at no more than a few taka are removed from letters, which
forces people to take their letters to the post office for getting
the stamps cancelled in their presence instead of dropping the
letters in the nearest post box.
It was expected that the competition with private courier
services will force some changes and improvement in the postal
department. Some new facilities have indeed been added, like the
Express Mail Service which reaches mail very fast to foreign
destinations at much lower rates than are charged by the private
international courier services. The department has also introduced
e-mail service. But these innovations become meaningless when the
traditional services keep declining.
Though the age of IT has dawned, the importance of postal
service has not been supplanted in countries which are far ahead of
us in technology. In our case, no other communication network can
reach the 68,000 villages as the postal department is required to
do with its more than 9,000 offices (most of which are tiny
`non-departmental’ branch post offices paid and controlled by the
government).
A few days hence, on October 9, our postal department will
observe the World Postal Day. As an annual ritual, observance of
the day is not without significance but it will be more worthwhile
for the department to do some intensive stocktaking and to review
the position of our postal service in world perspective with the
aim of raising efficiency and speed and-what is particularly to be
emphasized-integrity of a section of postal employees.
Copyright 2001 THE INDEPENDENT all rights reserved as
distributed by WorldSources, Inc.AP WORLDSTREAM, 26th September 2001