Hard knock

A little after noon, Dinanath Salvi* hobbles up a steep incline in south Mumbai, his umbrella tucked into his khaki mailman’s bag. Over the course of five hours every day he winds through dozens of buildings in the neighbourhood, delivering letters door to door, as he has done for the past two decades. He is past 50 and would prefer a more sedentary role, but the choice isn’t his to make.

“More work, fewer staff,” he says, with a resigned shrug. He points to the rain pelting down. “Look, now it’s pouring,” he says. “But we soldier on.”

There are 1,829 postmen and women in Mumbai across 230 post offices. The sanctioned number is 3,607, which means nearly half the posts are vacant, leading to enormous strain on the existing staff.

They work six days a week, often more than eight hours a day, handling mail volumes that run into crores. In the financial year 2016-17, for instance, 118 crore articles passed through the city’s postal system.

That all is not well with this system — understaffed and overworked — became obvious last month when a Kurla postman was suspended and later booked by the police for failing to deliver mails. The errant worker had allegedly been dumping the postal articles in a watchman’s cabin for more than four months, promising to deliver them later. “But he never did,” said a police official. “I have not seen such a case before.”

Although he has been arrested, it’s still unclear why he abdicated his responsibilities, but the case serves to highlight the fact that the foot soldiers of India’s mail delivery system are a burdened lot.

“There is a lot of mail pendency,” says a postman, who is also a union member. “And most postmen are doing double duty.”

An additional beat fetches only ₹94 as added daily compensation, he said. Every post office in the city is understaffed and, instead of moving older postmen into mail-sorting jobs at the desk, they are made to do both sorting and delivery.

Earlier this year the National Federation of Postal Employees’ Union agitated to get the recruitment process resumed in Maharashtra and to ease the burden on existing staff. After receiving assurances in March that this would be taken care of, they have written twice to the authorities but with little success, they claim. The recruitment exam results for 2016-17 were cancelled after an official charged that the “process had been compromised”.

Postmen must trudge several kilometres a day, often with heavy bags. As the city has grown, open spaces have given way to buildings and shanties to skyscrapers, compounding the volume of work for postal staff. “The population has increased but the number of postmen has not,” says another postman from the central suburbs. “We come to work at 8am, not knowing when we will return home. On top of that, officials constantly threaten us with suspension or dismissal.”

It is difficult to get leave or have any kind of family life, said the 55-year-old worker.

Mumbai region postmaster-general Ganesh Sawaleshwarkar conceded staff shortfalls but rejected any attempt to connect the Kurla postman’s negligence to this. “If they feel overworked, they can always approach us,” he said.

The postal department has tried to fill the Mumbai vacancies with employees from rural areas and by redistributing the additional beats between existing staff. “Some beats have more work, some have less,” he said. “We are trying to minimise the problems.”

One postman in the northwestern suburbs said he considered applying for voluntary retirement. “I am tired and fed up,” he said. “We work 12 hours a day, and still deliveries are pending. Many of us have crossed the age of 50, how can we have the energy? Then we get shouted at by our bosses and by the public. It is a matter of shame.”

The regular staff says the practice of hiring college students temporarily, as is done from time to time, makes little sense. “It takes two or three months to learn the beat itself,” one postman pointed out.

Abha Singh, former director postal services for Maharashtra and Goa, said postmen’s demands were routinely met, including providing rain gear, an extra allowance for heavy bags and compensation for travel by auto in some situations. “There would be one or two here and there who will refuse to deliver mails, some wouldn’t fully sort letters,” she said. “When supervision is faulty some can get away with it, which emboldens them.”

(*Names changed to protect identity)

Bhavya Dore is a Mumbai-based journalist