Where the wave of cellular transmission has expedited social interaction, it has also carried away a historic mode of communication, the public postal service, relegating to rust hundreds of letter boxes installed across the city.
Initiated in 1880, under the British Raj, the Pakistan Post had installed scores of iron-made red letter boxes across multiples streets, highways and outside important public buildings for receiving civil and state mail, however in recent times the dated logistics of the service, accompanied by the gain in popularity of efficient, private postal services, has led to a sharp decline in the utilization of the installed letter boxes, which are now used occasionally to deposit lost identity cards and drivers licenses but are left to rust the remaining time.
“Our public postal service used to be very popular once as the system was efficient and the postman would diligently keep check on the delivery of mail,” nostalgically recalled Muhammad Bakhsh, a retired schoolteacher who felt that the custom of writing a letter and posting it was dying.
Ijaz Khan, a civil servant, seconded Bakhsh’s observation when he claimed that neither do the citizens utilize public letter boxes nor do the postmen regularly maintain the influx of letters in those boxes. “Gone are those days when people used to set up their own letter boxes outside their homes. The few installations that are left have now become redundant,” regretted Khan.
According to sources, a total of 1350 letter boxes of the Pakistan Post are installed in Punjab, out of which 708 are in the urban setting and 642 are installed in rural areas but in recent times the majority of the postal installations have become rusty and obsolete due partly to their lack of use and largely to their poor maintenance.
Even as the substandard maintenance of Pakistan Post’s letter boxes comes under public scrutiny, the service has not shied away from increasing its postal rates for letter deliveries.
As documents obtained by The Express Tribune clearly show a 50 per cent spike in the postage rates for Pakistan Post applicable from August 1, with the minimum cost of a letter lighter than 20 grams increased from Rs20 to Rs30 and the maximum cost of a package heavier than 2000 grams increased from Rs250 to Rs380.
Speaking to The Express Tribune on the decline of Pakistan Post, Mohammad Siddique, a retired postmaster conceded that the system was quite well-organized during the preceding years. “In our times, every postman used to take mail out of the letter boxes two to three times in a day and extra care was taken to repair and paint the letterboxes, so that rainwater would not damage the mail inside the boxes. However, even as the postal service has become less popular, letter boxes outside the Post Offices are still in use and the department is using three color letter boxes. Blue letter boxes are installed for overseas mail, green for domestic mail and red for intra-city mail,” informed Siddiqui.
Published in The Express Tribune, August 2nd, 2023.
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