Stamp of modernity: India Post aims to go from logistics to hangout hub

Your swanky coworking space, in the not too distant future, could well be the neighbourhood post office — the one you thought was good for only selling stamps.

- GULVEEN AULAKH

That’s just one of the revenue-generating plans on the drawing board of India Posts, the 150-year-old legacy postal service that has been struggling to find a footing since the demise of snail mail.

Pushed to the sidelines by sprightly emails and courier services, India Post is being given a top-to-toe makeover by the Department of Posts (DoP). Reimagining its vast real estate assets is just one initiative.

Other schemes include shedding the snail-mail tag with 24-hour delivery services, becoming the default last mile delivery provider for e-commerce firms Amazon and Flipkart, renovating post offices to make them user-friendly, bringing its parcel service at par with global courier services like UPS and FedEx, making its 450,000 employees — the largest after railways and defence — accountable, and becoming a profitable public sector unit.

“PSUs can be transformed like a private company and we’re doing it,” Chandra Sekhar Pemmasani, minister of state for communications who is monitoring the turnaround on a daily basis, told Business Standard.

India Post has 12 million sq metres of real estate, including 1,460 vacant land plots that make up 2.2 million sq m. However, there has been no attempt to determine the market value or revenue potential of these assets — something flagged by the Standing Committee on Communication and Information Technology in August last year.