Damaged post boxes lie near the Post Master General’s Office in Bhubaneswar. Picture by Ashwinee Pati

Bhubaneswar, Oct 9: Post boxes have been junked as typing and texting have practically erased the handwritten word.

The importance of post boxes has decreased to such an extent in the Internet age that many such boxes lie forgotten at various localities in the city, while several are badly in need of repair in areas even near the postmaster general’s office in the city.

There are 357 post boxes left in Bhubaneswar. The post offices here handle around 2 lakh speed post letters, 25,000 registered postal articles and 25 lakh ordinary mails every month. But with email options getting bigger by the day, post boxes are finding a dwindling number of takers in most urban areas.

The postal department of the central government — India Post — celebrates World Post Day today, while the National Postal Week will be celebrated till October 14.

“I hardly use the post boxes that are located near my home or school. I used to go to the PMG Square office only to drop speed post letters. I mostly communicate via e-mail,” says Jasaswini Mohapatra, a school principal.

Sony Parida, a Class IX student, says: “I used to send greeting cards to my relatives and friends only during the New Year. As I am still charmed by the impact of written words and the beauty of printed matter, I never send email greetings as I don’t think they have any appeal.”

Pawan Kumar Singh, director of postal services at the PMG office here, admits that there has been a drastic drop in personal communication through letters. “Email, mobile phones and text messages have restricted people’s urge to write. They don’t even want to write full words and sentences these days. So, India Post is now increasingly focusing on catering to the needs of business-to-business, business-to-customer and customer-to-business segments, which include companies writing letters to other companies, bills from companies to customers and application forms to various institutions respectively,” he says.

“In the segment of customer-to-customer letters, India Post mainly handles invitation cards. Interestingly, people tend to use the designated boxes inside the post offices more compared to the roadside post boxes. A box inside a post office gets around 500 mails in a day, while a roadside post box hardly gets 20 letters ,” says a senior officer of India Post.

“We have received some complaints regarding damaged post boxes. We have brought some here for repairs and they will be reinstalled soon. However, in some places, there are a number of post boxes within a very short distance. So, we also need to reorganise their locations,” says another officer at the PMG office.

Singh, however, adds that India Post is planning to introduce many new facilities in the city. “Shortly, we will have an unmanned sorting machine in Bhubaneswar. Such machines are being used in metro cities such as Mumbai and Chennai since the 1990s. There is also a plan to introduce core banking at all the post offices in the state in the near future as all the 1.55 lakh post offices across the nation are going to be connected through a network. Automated teller machines will also be placed near major post offices in the city for faster and round-the-clock financial transactions.”

Three post offices in Odisha — Chhatrapur, Puri and Rourkela — will get the Sevattom certification from the Bureau of Indian Standards this year for their range and level of services and customer satisfaction index.

“We will also try to include two more post offices in the state under the category,” says Singh.