The
Asian Age 24 Feb 2016 :
Villagers
in India opting for services provided by online retailers to get goods
delivered
Alwar,
Feb. 23: With his rickety bicycle and sackcloth mail bag, 62- year- old Indian
postman Chet Ram does not look like a worker at the vanguard of an ecommerce revolution
delivering everything from mobile phones to cow manure. He
pedals miles each day in rural Rajasthan state, ferrying packages to villages
and takes payments in cash because most of his customers do not have bank
accounts, let alone credit cards. While in the United States online giant
Amazon and its ilk experiment with futuristic drones and one- hour deliveries,
in rural India e- commerce retains a distinctly old- fashioned feel.
Yet
the dawn of online shopping is changing the lives of people in rural areas —
and is breathing new life into India Post, the ailing state- run postal
network, which has struggled with a huge deficit for years.
In
the past two years the 160- year- old postal giant has tied up with 400 e-
commerce companies including Amazon and Indian giant Flipkart to deliver a
diverse range of goods.
It
deploys its vast network of about 460,000 employees across 155,000 post offices
to take goods to customers in remote areas, often hundreds of kilometres (
miles) from the nearest town.
Government
clerk Surinder Singh Yadav from rural Ula Hedi village in Neemrana district
says the dawn of e- commerce has transformed shopping for his family, who now
nudge him to order products they see advertised on television.
“These
companies give us a variety we don’t get in our local markets, quality at
competitive rates and a doorstep delivery” said Yadav, as he accepted a
delivery of a spray paint machine.
Online
commerce The absence of reliable private delivery companies outside the big
cities led India Post to step in to fill the gap.
“Until
recently, people in these rural areas had aspirations but no means to access
the market,” Kavery Banerjee, secretary of India Post, told AFP.
“Now
we are delivering women's clothes and latest electronic gadgets even in the
remote regions of country like Leh and Ladakh,” she added. It has been a huge
success, with parcel deliveries increasing 15- fold to 75,000 daily deliveries
in the past two years. But India’s vast areas of rural terrain, where roads can
be poor and infrastructure patchy, pose challenges to the digital revolution.
Most
small post offices, like the one in Neemrana, depend on unreliable public
transport to collect parcels from region's bigger post offices.
Postal
workers use bicycles and old cloth mail bags which make it difficult to
transport bigger or multiple parcels.
Many
rural Indians are still new to the Internet — up to a billion people are not
yet online in the country — and are wary of ecommerce sites, preferring to hand
over money only after receiving the goods.
Part
of the firms’ success has been driven by giving customers the chance to pay
cash on delivery — although it takes up to two days to find out if a parcel was
accepted by a distant recipient.
“It
has given a sense of empowerment to customers who are not confident about e-
commerce shopping,” said K. C Verma, an assistant superintendent at a post
office in Behror, a town close to Neemrana.
One
such customer is Sudesh Yadav, a farmer's wife in Daulat Singh Pura village in
Neemrana who refused to accept her parcel of a car cleaning kit.
“The
company has sent the order almost a week late,” she told the postman who had
cycled to her home on a cold January morning to deliver the goods. “We have
already purchased it from a nearby town. Take it back,” she said.
Financial
woes India Post, founded under colonial rule in 1854, hopes the huge growth of
e- commerce will enable it to reverse its ailing financial situation. The value
of cash- on- delivery parcels handled by the postal department is expected to
register a 300 per cent increase by the end of financial 2015 compared with
last year, India Post said.
It
hopes to slash its $ 800 million average annual deficit and improve
profitability at its 140,000 rural post offices.
Communication
and Information Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad told reporters last
month that the Indian postal department had the potential to become the
"world's leading e- commerce delivery platform".
The
department has upgraded or added around 70 modern parcel handling centres with
existing post offices in the last two years and plans to add to its standing
fleet of around 900 mail vans across India.
It
also plans to address the issue of tracking deliveries, including by giving
handheld devices to postal workers. For rural India's postmen, the flood of
parcel deliveries recalls the days of the 1980s or 1990s when sending letters
and postcards was much more common.
“These
parcel deliveries in the last couple of years are once again making us busier,”
Ratan Lal, a postman with Neemrana post office said.
