When mail goes astray
By Laila Nasry
Letters strewn around her garden in Mount Lavinia.
That was what Krishnikala Siriwardene found on the afternoon of December
22. It came as no surprise Christmas mail for her and her family, but rather
a shock to find that they were greeting cards, some still in their envelopes,
bearing foreign postmarks such as America, Hong Kong and Cyprus. Those
letters were not addressed to her but  to
people mostly living in Ratmalana.
"It was as if someone had thrown them over the garden wall," she says.
Missing mail, pilfered cheques, lost magazines, torn parcels and working
at snail's pace, sounds familiar not only in Mount Lavinia but all over
the country, so The Sunday Times asked Postmaster General W.M. Piyasena
what the problem was.
A severe dearth of staff, was his lament. "All units of the Postal Department
suffer from a 15% shortage of staff with only 22,700 persons to look into
the postal needs of a population of 18 million. We need 7,278 postmen,
but have only 5,883," says Mr. Piyasena.
And mail loss is at the bottom of the PMG's list of priorities in the
day-to-day running of this massive operation. Sometimes he has to close
counters at post offices during working hours as he just doesn't have the
staff to man them. "It was a government policy to ban recruitment and for
the past 20 years no vacancies have been filled."
Usually his staff handles 1.5 million articles a day but this jumps
to 3 million during the season. To cope with the rush of sorting and distributing
this large volume at Christmas, post offices deploy registered substitutes
to boost regular cadres. "But still, at times we have delays and complaints
of non-delivery."
With regard to the specific instance where letters were dumped in Mount
Lavinia, a postal supervisor for the area said, "It's all in the hands
of the postman. He has to be honest in carrying out his job, which is to
deliver people's letters to their doorstep." There is no way of ascertaining
whether the postman carries out his duty to the letter once the mail bag
has been handed over to him. "For that would entail assigning an officer
per postman to supervise him while he does his rounds, and nowhere in the
world is that possible," the officer stresses.
Though preventing the non-delivery of letters can be an impossible task,
there is some hope in tracing missing mail. "If the letter is registered,
the number on the slip helps to determine its whereabouts. However, there
is no way to track an unregistered letter," he says.
What is the answer? As there have been numerous complaints of missing
mail in the past, there is a procedure followed by the Postal Department,
without writing it off completely . "We first search for it within the
post office. Then we ask the postman." If the letter still cannot be found,
the standard procedure requires the post office to conduct an inquiry.
"This is carried out by the officers of the investigations unit of the
General Post Office and if the postman is found guilty, he is sacked,"
the officer explained.
But the investigations unit is also understaffed. PMG Piyasena says,
"We are not in a position to hold inquiries often. The unit has 45 vacancies
as against a cadre capacity of 62." Therefore, the operations of the investigations
unit and the flying squads which conducted random checks on post offices
have been put on hold.
However, all hope is not lost. Post offices have a supervisory hierarchy
from Supervisory Officers to Provincial Deputy Postmasters General. Their
duty is to ensure that the public is served properly. "Even the postman
is the third or fourth step in the ladder of promotions and only those
with vast experience are recruited," he says.
Adds Mr. Piyasena, "We do our maximum to find lost mail through our
track and trace system. But this is society. You can't totally prevent
letters and parcels from being stolen."
Unfortunately, this is small consolation for those anxiously awaiting
the ring of the postman. |
