India Post introduced a six-digit Postal Index Number (PIN) code on August 15, 1972, the day the silver jubilee of India’s independence was observed. The idea was to give a unique identity to all physical addresses of the country in terms of the delivery jurisdiction of the post offices. This code was expected to help in bypassing the challenge of inaccurate addressing and ensure accurate and fast delivery by post offices. Now it is time to introspect whether the system succeeded in achieving its purpose in the last 50 years.
The postal code, known differently in different countries viz. postcode, zip code, etc, is an alpha-numeric or numeric number that is included in the postal address for easy identification of the sorting-district and the addressee’s delivery post office. The codes were introduced nationwide in Germany in the year 1944, Singapore (1950), Argentina (1958), the U.S. (1963), Switzerland (1964), India (1972), and the U.K. (1974). Introduction of sorting machines in the West in the 1960s also necessitated the introduction of codes since the machines could not read the addressee’s post office easily if described in writing. The Universal Postal Union says that 160 countries of the world have so far introduced postal codes.
Speeding up the sorting
The post code revolutionised the system of manual postal sorting as the sorters are not required to keep in memory the locations of thousands of post offices. To what extent did the PIN code succeeded in speeding up the sorting in India? It is intriguing that even after five decades, a substantial volume of mail in India is not PIN coded. The Government took efforts to educate the citizens to write the PIN code of the addressee on the mail. It succeeded to a small extent. Until about a decade ago, government offices and the billers of the utility services were the biggest culprits. In cities such as Delhi and Kolkata, where sorting work is done by machines, mails without PIN code must be coded separately before they are put to sorting machine, causing delay in processing at the sorting centres.
Of late, the proportion of PIN-coded mails in India started improving after the introduction of computerised billing by utility service providers and the launching of KYC norms by banks, where providing complete and accurate addresses is mandatory. Now, new challenges have come up. Personal mail has almost vanished after the revolution of mobile telephony in the last two decades. What remains with the postal system are documents and e-commerce parcels where there is stiff competition from the couriers. Is the present structure of PIN code capable of handling that challenge?
The PIN code helps in taking a piece of mail to the addressee’s post office. The delivery jurisdiction of the post office is normally divided into beats and there is a postman assigned to each beat. Beat sorting at the post office is done manually in India.
Can we think of integrating the beat code with the six-digit PIN code? The PIN code in that case will not only identify the addressee’s post office but also the concerned beat. If the post office makes the mobile number of the delivery person of the beat available, citizens may even leave instructions to him regarding his convenience to take delivery.
Machines to the rescue
Nowadays, the letter sorting machines, flat sorting machines (handling packets) and parcel sorting machines have tremendous capacity for sorting in a day. With the dwindling volume of personal mail, it is not impossible to sort all incoming mail and shipments at one circle or regional hub, making the concept of sorting-district redundant. Even the beat-sorting, which is done at the level of the post office, can be done in the circle hub, if the beat code is integrated with the PIN code.
The logistic system associated in processing of e-commerce articles is intrinsically different from that of handling personal mails. A postman used to go to his beat in a bicycle along with a hundred mail pieces for delivery. But he needs a vehicle for delivery of fewer number of e-commerce parcels. For that, we need to centralise the parcel delivery centres and mechanise the beats. This in the long run may even call for rationalisation of PIN codes.
The system of postal code that was introduced 50 years back may not be operationally relevant in the new role of a post office. Is India Post ready to take that challenge? Though the code was originally designed to help postal operations, today it is used by couriers, e-commerce players and various other service providers as a means of locational identification of a person. This aspect also needs to be kept in mind before rationalising the PIN code.
Gautam Bhattacharya is an independent commentator on socio-economic issues and a former civil servant.
