File Photo: India Post Office in New Delh
MUMBAI: With e-commerce platforms increasingly
turning to the India Post to deliver their orders to customers, the fast
flourishing e-retail business has become a revenue generator for the state-run
agency, whose traditional operations are dented by the deep penetration of
e-mail and mobile phones.
Realising the potential, the Postal Department has set up a dedicated
e-commerce and parcel processing center in the country's commercial hub Mumbai.
Spread across 12,000 sq ft, the facility at Parel in the city has bagged good
business in a short span, handling around 5,000 orders a day.
The department officials
expect at this pace the traffic would soon increase to 10,000 parcels per day.
The facility has a capacity to process 30,000 parcels per day.
Quite a few e-commerce companies have already approached the department seeking
tie-up with India's oldest and most trusted national postal facility including
major players like Amazon, Snapdeal, Flipkart, E-bey, Telebrand India, TVC network,
Quick Services and Red Box.
"The commercial agreement started taking place last year and by now we
have had commercial tie-up with 46 e-commerce companies in Mumbai region, 7 in
Pune and 6 in Goa," said a senior official from the Postal Department.
"Since our Speed Post service is known as the most preferred and premium
brand, these companies are taking our services to deliver their goods through
us," said the officer.
"In the last financial year, we earned almost Rs. 10 crore from
delivering articles booked through E-commerce companies and for the current
year, we have doubled our target," he said adding that department has full
right to check and intercept the articles for the examining purposes.
Apart from electronic items such as mobile handsets and a variety of gadgets a
host of other items like apparels, consumables goods, perfumes, intimation
jewellery and a wide range of various other products booked through e-commerce
platform are delivered by post.
Rajiv Singal, trustee of Bharat Merchant Chamber and an expert in postal
issues, said, "E-commerce companies have provided a opportunity to revive
the business of postal department and the department of post should
commercially exploit it with full capacity."
Source : Mumbai: Press Trust of India.
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