With his rickety bicycle and sackcloth mail bag, 62-year-old postman Chet Ram does not look like a worker at the vanguard of an e-commerce revolution delivering everything from mobile phones to cow manure.
He pedals miles each day in rural Rajasthan, ferrying packages and taking payments in cash because most of his customers do not have bank accounts, let alone credit cards.
The dawn of online shopping is changing the lives of people in rural areas — and is breathing new life into the ailing India Post, 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 Flipkart to deliver a 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.
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 delivery of a spray paint machine.
India Post, founded under colonial rule in 1854, hopes the huge growth of e-commerce will enable it to reverse its financial situation.
The value of cash-on-delivery parcels handled by the postal department is expected to register a 300 percent increase by the end of this financial year compared with last year, India Post said.
It hopes to slash its $800 million (about ₹5,500 crore) average annual deficit and improve profitability at its 140,000 rural post offices.
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 electronic gadgets even in remote regions 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 the rural terrain, where roads can be poor and infrastructure patchy, poses challenges. Most small post offices, like the one in Neemrana, depend on unreliable public transport to collect parcels from the region’s bigger post offices. Many rural people are new to the Internet and wary of e-commerce, 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,” said KC Verma, an assistant superintendent at a post office in Behror, near 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. “We have already purchased it from a nearby town. Take it back,” she said.