Union Government should frame guidelines for couriers. Since important documents like cheques and drafts are carried by this service, registration of courier-service with Union Ministry of Communications should be compulsory with list of their offices recorded with the Ministry and displayed on website of the ministry.
Courier-boys deliver documents any time during the day. Such a system is totally unsafe in residential areas especially for ladies and senior citizens. Mischievous persons can enter the residence for malaise intention of loot, rape or murder in form of courier-boys. Otherwise also it is not fair to disturb rest-hours of residents to deliver documents which many-a-times contain junk-mail like publicity-material. There should be fixed timings to deliver couriers especially in residential areas. It may be mentioned that mail by Indian Posts Department is always delivered during some fixed timings only.
At times, couriers are delivered very late even after weeks. Addressee should be aware about despatch-date by making it compulsory for courier-agencies to print date of receipt by courier-agency together with the courier-number. Courier-services should leave message-slip about the undelivered courier to enable addressee to take delivery of documents in case of his/her unavailability at the address.
Best is to encourage reliable and economical Speed Post service by Department of Posts by having ‘one nation, one tariff’ policy with its tariff being uniformly fixed at rupees say twenty or thirty per 50 gms (inclusive of GST) for complete country instead of charging differently for local and non-local Speed post. This service then can be still more popularised by initiating system of sponsored postal stamps whereby private bodies may be able to get postal-stamps of their designs (to be approved by postal-department) on payment of some fixed charge per stamp and on some minimum prescribed print-order, like is presently in case of not-much-used post-cards and inland-letter-cards with advertisements on these reducing heavy burden on postal-subsidy to some extent.
MADHU AGRAWAL