Now, Post Graduates

You might have already heard Vande Mataram on it. Or "Happy Gudi Purab". Perhaps even messages to spread literacy sometimes.... But "Yehi hai right choice, baby" on your telephone?

Nah! That’d be going too far, you think? Well, think again. Because that’s what telephone users across the country may soon hear instead of the monotonous dial tone that grates on the ear. Along with perhaps "Coca-Cola enjoy" and "Aya naya Ujala". In a multi-pronged effort to partially privatise the cash-strapped Indian Posts and Telegraph (P&T) department, the government is seriously considering allowing ad jingles promoting consumer products on the phone.

What may or may not be music to your ears has been necessitated by the absence of the sweet sound of money in the postal till. Painted into a corner by a cash crunch that is threatening the very survival of the department, forget good performance, the government has prepared a blueprint to not only lift the sagging image of the P&T department but also provide it with a smart new "market-friendly" face. The plan, say officials, will help raise resources to square the losses, provide incentives for its innumerable and generally ill-paid workers and help bring about a return to profits in the next two years. And in keeping with the trend in almost every other sector in the economy, the private sector will help usher in the new dawn.

The P&T department has been unviable for some time, forcing the finance minister to include issues like the price hike of a postcard in the budget. But things have been stretched quite thin in the last two years with operating losses and subsidies mounting to an unmanageable level. Last year, the loss on account of postal stationery alone was Rs 200 crore. Broken down, the loss is about Rs 1.75 per postcard. The total number of postcards sold per year is close to 43 crore, which accounts for Rs 80 crore of losses. Similarly, about 40 crore inland letters are sold every year, resulting in losses of about Rs 40 crore to Rs 45 crore every year. On envelopes, the losses are about Rs 25 crore on sales of Rs 18 crore. The department also makes losses on other stationery like reply cards, air mail and money order forms. And if you also include losses from other services including telephones, the total losses are well and truly phenomenal.

To start with, the government will, for the first time in P&T history, allow private sector advertisements to be carried within the system. In telephones, these will conveniently replace the dial tone. In postal stationery, the comfortable monopoly of the Directorate of Audio-Visual Publicity will come to an end. Print ads far removed from the standard polio vaccine, literacy or family planning messages will appear on inland letters, postcards and pre-stamped envelopes. Even money order forms will not be spared.

The government expects to immediately recover about 65 to 75 per cent-roughly Rs 130 crore to Rs 140 crore-of the losses from the new proposal. A pilot project was carried out in 1999-2000 in a fixed-rate tender system in Delhi, which earned Rs 5 crore for the government. Another pilot, to carry private sector advertisements on letterboxes, was carried out in Chennai, which earned another Rs 20 lakh. Says Tapan Sikdar, Union minister for communications: "In the coming fiscal year, we intend to follow an open-tendering system for four different zones, classified into different areas to ensure that the tenders are not cornered by bigger companies alone."

The government’s plans are fairly elaborate. "We are not targeting just stationery or telephones. We want to attack the work culture. We want to make the entire department work as one unit to take advantages of cross-subsidisation and ensure that consumers always get the best deal," says Sikdar. Indeed, the proposal will touch not only postal stationery but also those staid red letter boxes, postal vans and even post offices and telecom services.

Adds Sikdar: "There are over three lakh post offices in the country. If the plan is carried out properly, we can not only recover our losses but even start making profit in the first year itself." The plan includes converting post offices into consumer marts, very much like what Indian Oil Corporation is doing to its petrol pumps, where people can buy not just their postcards and inland letters but other stationery and consumer items including fancy gift items. This plan is already in operation in some of the bigger post offices in the capital, though on a much smaller scale. At the Indraprastha post office in central Delhi, as well as at some others, a separate private-owned "post shoppe" sells stationery and gift items. The new-look post offices may also have a few vending machines for soft drinks and coffee to complete the picture.

A massive publicity campaign to promote the new face and attitude of the postal department will follow shortly. This will be done through the media as well as through promotional material such as printed T-shirts, designer watches, caps and so on.

To add punch to the plan, the government is also thinking in terms of a partial privatisation of the official courier Speedpost, whereby private parties will be allowed to set up collection centres on a commission basis. The services are managed totally by the government now. This will be started at Delhi and Mumbai in the beginning and will be taken to all the places Speedpost reaches today. Speedpost is one of the few profit-making services run by the government and recorded a growth of 40 per cent in 1999-2000 over the previous year. Says Sikdar: "We want to improve services and give Speedpost such a dependable identity that people will leave others to come and use our service."

A unique concept of a mobile post office will also be introduced shortly. Under this scheme, postmen will be authorised to vend postal stationery and stamps as well as provide postal services door-to-door and earn commission per transaction. This, the government feels, will not only bring in better returns but, through these incentives, a better work culture in an organisation known more for its inefficiency and negligence.

There’s a lot going for the telecommunications sector too. Says Sikdar: "We aim to have telephone on demand throughout the country by 2002. This is available at only a few places now. We want to create a situation where you can book your telephone connection on the Internet or even over the telephone and get it overnight." At present, there are over 2.6 crore telephone connections in the country on a built-in capacity of three crore lines. The current demand for telephone lines, however, is in excess of 1.2 crore, which cannot be serviced due to lack of infrastructure. The government feels that as a result of the new plan, telephone density will increase from the current 2.5 lines per 1,000 people to about 15 per thousand with a few incentives attached to new connections. "By 2002, India would have over five crore telephone lines," he adds.

Even rural telephone networks, one of the government’s recent focus areas, may be handed over to the private sector for running and management on 75 per cent commission. These are now managed entirely by village panchayats on a 50 per cent commission. But revenue generation is poor and the networks are almost universally ill-maintained because there is hardly any management and accountability. The networks will be given STD/ISD facilities and gradually, Internet connections. To invite franchisees, the registration fee will be cut from Rs 500 to Rs 250. From about 3.46 lakh village telephones serviced by such networks now, the number is hoped to be increased to about six lakh-at least one in every village-in the next two years. Says Sikdar: "We want to see telephones and Internet connections at every district headquarters in the country soon."

In the next three to four years, the government plans to set up IT dhabas at the block level in every district with telephone, Internet and all other telecom facilities. These will also be run by the private sector. To make this successful, the government proposes to request each MP to fund one computer every year for an educational institution in their constituency from their Rs 2 crore annual fund.

Therefore, even if the post office does not come to your doorstep, you can be sure that Sikdar and his colleagues at the P&T department will get their message across to you.