HIT BY LOCKDOWN

With no way out of city, parcels pile up

Why Keep Post Offices Open When We Cannot Deliver, Ask 40K Employees Working Across TN

Ram.Sundaram@timesgroup.com

Chennai:30.03.2020

There are mounds of parcels waiting to be shipped off, but there are no means to dispatch them. This is the situation in Chennai Central and the city’s postal head office on Anna Salai. Despite the nationwide lockdown to fight Covid-19, 40,000-odd employees in 12,000 post offices in the state are being forced to show up at work and man deserted counters.

The employees continue to use biometric attendance to punch in despite an advisory against it from the Centre, and those delivering posts door-to-door in the city haven’t been given masks, gloves or sanitisers.

Every day, post offices in TN deliver an average of one lakh posts to every nook and corner of the state. Since the lockdown began on Tuesday last, thousands of parcels including important legal notices, financial statements and registered posts, lie undispatched. With limited number of mail vans, a majority of the posts were dispatched to concerned states/ districts through trains and buses. Now that road transportation and rail services are cut off, what’s the point of making their lives miserable by keeping post offices open, ask employees. They have requested the chief postmaster general for complete closure of the facilities fearing this could endanger their lives.

Even before the national lockdown was formally announced, private couriers had cut back on services and stopped accepting bookings, leaving post offices as the last resort for the public.

On Tuesday (March 24), all bookings in Chennai were stocked and sent to the major Rail Mail Service (RMS) points — Chennai Central and Egmore railway stations. With no trains leaving, that night, parcels at Egmore were moved to Ekkatuthangal post office so they can be dispatched to the southern districts through the last truck leaving. But on Sunday, the parcels at Central were yet to be cleared.

After a week’s wait, around 2,000 consignments were likely to be dispatched through special trains to Mumbai, Kolkata and Delhi sectors on Monday morning, said a postal department source. These are mostly magazines, invitations, pamphlets and in other words ‘not-so-urgent’ items, said the source.

“But the 7,000 items at Anna Road head office in Chennai were registered posts which contained legal notices, financial statements, personal communications and other important items that couldn’t be dispatched. It’s bad that the post offices are still open despite this,” the source added.

How can it be ‘essential’ services when the needs aren’t fulfilled, ask employees. “What is the benefit in providing such facilities in the name of essential services when booked articles have no further disposal except for lying idle, either in the post office or hubs gathering dust,” asked N J Uthayakumaran, Chennai circle secretary of National Association of Postal Employees (Nape). Such hoarding can lead to important parcels like medicines and equipment getting buried in the mounds as employees will not know what’s inside them, he added.

“For cash withdrawals, there are ATMs in every street corner and in all post offices. So there is no need for employees to be physically present in the offices,” Uthayakumaran said in his letter to the chief postmaster general, urging for the post offices to be shut.