Companies (Page 386)

Many years ago, when I lived in the United States, the mail was a constant source of excitement. I would look forward to opening the mailbox and sifting through the new wonders with giddy excitement. The serendipity of not knowing what each day would bring was a small but cherished part of my day.

I haven’t experienced those feelings in nearly 20 years, partly because the utility of the postal service is different outside of the US and partly because of the rise of all things digital and paperless. 

In South Africa, where I now live, the postal service is in a state of near collapse. The SA Post Office was put in provisional liquidation in February. The decline at the post office has been slow and steady for the past two decades. Now executives are applying to the court system to be placed in business rescue to avoid additional lawsuits from creditors and escape liquidation. 

I have to use the postal service here sparingly. Even though I have canceled my beloved print subscriptions to magazines and journals, I still get issues delivered from years ago. I recently opened my cobwebbed post box to find a copy of the London Review of Books dated April 2022.

Post offices around the world do a lot more than deliver mail. Traditionally they have offered essential services to communities like access to benefits, bill payment, and banking services. Universal (and free) access to mail and parcels is just one service. In developed and developing countries, access to these services is vital for underprivileged urban and rural communities that lack other options. 

Pundits and analysts such as Business Day columnist Khaya Sithole have lamented the inability of the SA Post Office to use its large footprint in the country and pivot the business model.

Sithole said new business ventures, “such as providing social grants and reducing the digital divide between citizens by bringing technological resources closer to communities, it languished in mission drift where the main activity became paying salaries to its employees at the end of each month.”

Fading role

The demise of South Africa’s postal service is an extreme example of a more significant trend. As more essential services like bill payments move to smartphones and the need for physical mail dissolves, the post office’s role as a service hub is fading. 

The Indian post office is more than 167 years old but has struggled in recent years to stay relevant in the digital age. Similar to the infrastructure challenges facing the US Postal Service, India Post hasn’t been able to leverage its existing resources to continue offering the services residents demand. 

In the Middle East, where the first postal service may have originated in ancient Egypt and where the Persian Empire developed a sophisticated delivery network that formed the basis of many modern systems, the story is somewhat different. 

Several nations have already moved on from a model where the post office served an essential role.

The United Arab Emirates, for example, has never offered universal access to mail services. Access is provided for a price, and regular mail has never taken off in the country. Utility bills and other officialdom have generally found their way to one’s office but now everything is handled through apps and over e-mail.

Interestingly, Emirates Post never became a significant actor in either bill or remittance payments. Without a footprint in the remittance market, the post office was never going to have a large role in society. The UAE is a global focal point for remittances because of the many foreign workers. 

Curiously, the lack of a robust postal service and the country’s unique system of road addressing (or lack of a system of road addressing) were vital ingredients needed to create one of the most valuable companies ever built in the UAE.

Aramex, the first Arab company listed on the Nasdaq, started as an express delivery service in Dubai and has grown into a massive multinational logistics empire. The genius behind the Aramex model is how the company uses drivers that have highly localized knowledge. Without clear street names, these drivers must rely on landmarks and local expertise to ensure packages are delivered to the right person and on time. 

Digital reality

As an idea and service, the post office still has an essential societal role. To realize this role, the post office must radically pivot away from paper products and embrace our digital reality. This is a painful reality for those with fond memories of receiving mail every day, but we can’t stop how pervasive our devices have become.

For the post office truly to embrace its mandate in the digital age, it must move to complete digital options. Imagine if the post office in your country functioned much the same as the app store on your phone – no physical branches, accessible on all your devices with a click of a button. 

There is room for innovative ideas concerning the digital post office, but we might have to wait a while to see them take effect. As one of the largest and oldest state-owned enterprises in many countries, changes taking root in the post office tend to be glacial at best. Yet smaller countries with less traditional postal operations can make changes with a lot more ease than larger countries.

With its failing post office, South Africa is another area where change could occur. The direction of travel is clear; it’s just a matter of finding the political will to build the post office of the future. 

This article was provided by Syndication Bureau, which holds copyright.

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A devastating rail crash that left almost 300 people dead has refocused international attention on the importance of railways in the lives of Indians.

Indeed, to many Western observers, images of men and women crammed into overcrowded cars serve as a metaphor for modern India.

Take, for example, a report by German newspaper Der Spiegel on India’s population surpassing China’s. Published just weeks before the accident in Odisha province on June 2, the now much-criticized cartoon depicted a shabby Indian train crammed with passengers rushing past a streamlined Chinese train with only two people in it.

Where does this enduring image in the West of Indian railways – and of India – come from?

As a scholar of Indian history and author of the 2015 book Tracks of Change: Railways and Everyday Life in Colonial India, I believe the answers lie in the gigantic infrastructure projects of the 19th century – forged at the intersection of colonial dictates and capitalist demands.

A carrier of freight, not people

Railways remain the backbone of passenger traffic in India, transporting some 23 million people daily. In the pre-pandemic 2018-19 financial year, 7.7 billion passenger journeys in India. In comparison, even after a dramatic post-pandemic increase, airline passenger traffic was 123.2 million in 2022.

Yet, when first planned in the 1840s, India’s railways were intended to transport primarily freight and livestock, not people.

Indians were thought unlikely to become railway passengers by directors of the English East India Co, a merchant monopoly that gradually annexed and administered large parts of India under UK crown control.

Many people at the time disagreed that Indians were immobile people, pointing out that the country had a long history of global trade across vast oceanic networks.

However, early colonial railway policy was driven by pervasive Orientalist imaginings of a people rendered immobile by poverty, living in isolated villages and constrained by religious restrictions prohibiting travel.

The trope interlocked with colonial thinking that railways would foster greater industrialization which in turn would further a capitalist economy. It also aligned with the practical needs of a colonial trading monopoly that needed raw materials for English industries, such as cotton, to be moved swiftly and efficiently from India’s interiors to port towns, from where they could be shipped.

Relegated to cheap seats

To induce the “natives,” as the British often referred to their colonial subjects, to use railways, the colonial government pitched low fares, especially in third-class cars – the lowest and cheapest category of rail travel.

The decision to introduce lower fares seems at odds with the profit-driven aims of a capitalist venture, with money raised by private companies incorporated in the United Kingdom.

However, British capitalists and shareholders in these private ventures did not have to fear for their profits, which were underwritten by the Indian taxpayer. The colonial government of India guaranteed these companies a 5% annual return on their investment whether or not the venture turned a profit.

Despite the doubters, the new Indian railways attracted an increasing number of passengers.

The half-million passengers recorded in 1854 when tracks became operational increased to 26 million in 1875. By 1900, annual passenger figures stood at 175 million and then almost trebled to 520 million by 1919-20. By the time of the partition of India in 1947 it had risen to more than 1 billion passenger journeys annually. Indeed, images of overcrowded trains came to epitomize the upheaval of partition, with the rail system used to carry swaths of uprooted peoples across the soon-to-be Pakistan-India border.

Third-class passengers, overwhelmingly Indians, comprised almost 90% of this traffic.

These escalating figures did not, however, generate a lowering of fares. Nor did they result in any substantial improvements in the conditions of overcrowded, unsanitary third-class travel.

Instead, railway companies sought “the greatest economy of space and load,” as one rail manager put it. Inadequate rolling stock, much of it imported, exacerbated matters.

A tool for ‘self-composure’

The generally British railway managers seemed disinclined to remedy systematic overcrowding, which included transporting passengers in wagons meant for livestock. Rather, they insisted that such overcrowding was caused by the peculiar habits and inclinations of Indian passengers: their alleged abhorrence of empty carriages and their inclination to follow one another “like sheep” into crowded carriages.

These attributes were soon rendered into a more public narrative, especially among Western mindsets. Journalist H. Sutherland Stark, writing for the industry publication Indian State Railways Magazine in 1929, stated that although he was “unversed” in railway administration and traffic control, he knew railway facilities were not the problem. Rather, Indian passengers lacked the mental preparedness, “self-possession” and “method” necessary to travel like “sane human beings.”

Stark suggested passenger education as a solution to the perceived problem, making railway travel a tool for “self-composure and mass orderliness.” He was not the only one to suggest a congruence between rational railway travel and reasonable public behavior. In the 1910s, though condemning railway management for perpetuating the indignities that third-class passengers faced, the nationalist leader Mahatma Gandhi also suggested educating railway passengers as a means to create a civic body of citizens.

A continuing metaphor

More than a century later, this depiction endures, though, ironically, it now serves as a foil to understanding contemporary India. In a piece published in The New York Times on March 12, 2005, the author lauded the then-new Delhi metro, emphasizing that it had “none of the chaotic squalor of hawkers and beggars that characterizes mainline railroads in India, nor do desperate travelers hang from the sides of the trains.”

As the debate rages on whether safety has taken a back seat to “glossy modernization projects” in India – early analyses suggest signaling failure might have caused June 2, 2023, accident – railways continue to represent India’s history.

In the heyday of empire, they were deemed the technology through which Britain would drag India into capitalist modernity. In 1947, they became a leitmotif for the trauma of the partition that accompanied the independence of India and Pakistan. As the coverage of the Odisha accident reminds us, it continues to be a metaphor in the West for evaluating contemporary India.

Ritika Prasad is an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina – Charlotte.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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