New Delhi, Sept. 27: The Kendriya Vidyalayas will give priority to admitting children of postmen working in remote villages to encourage the new generation to take up the much-romanticised profession that may be in its death throes.

The Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan (KVS), which runs the country’s largest chain of public schools, has decided to grant wards of rural postmen, mostly working on an ad hoc basis, admission on a par with non-transferable central government employees from 2009, it was learnt.

The decision was taken at the organisation’s last board of governors meeting on July 26 after a personal request from human resource development minister Arjun Singh, top government officials said. The KVS runs 981 schools across India.

Over 3.5 lakh postmen are posted across India’s villages, many still inaccessible, where the khaki-clad dakiya immortalised by Rajesh Khanna in Palkon ki Chhaon Mein continues to enjoy a critical role, the government officials said.

“The romanticised role of the postman in rural India as someone who reads out messages to the illiterate and writes letters on behalf of villagers anxious to communicate with loved ones in distant lands is largely accurate,” said a senior official at IndiaPost, the country’s postal service.

Postmen are recruited in separate cadres — for urban postings and as grameen dak sevaks (rural postmen).

Despite the Internet invasion and the advent of more modern modes of communication, the grameen dak sevaks continue to be the major link between many villages and the rest of the world, the official said.

But the rate of fresh recruitments to the postal service has been decreasing, especially to posts in rural areas where the service is needed the most, an official of the ministry of communications and IT said.

Earlier this year, IndiaPost had urged the communications and IT ministry to introduce incentives — other than a hike in salaries — for rural postmen amid growing desperation over dwindling interest in the profession, the ministry official said.

“Technology has taken away much of the profession’s sheen and the popular perception everywhere is that sooner or later the profession will become extinct.... Once people stop joining in rural areas, the profession will indeed become extinct,” the official said.

The communications and IT ministry wrote to the HRD ministry proposing admissions to Kendriya Vidyalayas for wards of rural postmen on a par with other central government employees.

“The schools were started to cater to the needs of central government employees with transferable jobs. Later, its mandate was expanded to admit central employees in non-transferable jobs. But grameen dak sevaks, who fall in this category, were not included as many of them work on ad hoc basis,” an official in the HRD ministry said.