E-mail and Snail Mail United

bahree writes "The BBC has an interesting story about how some people living in some of the most inaccessible areas of India are enjoying an improved postal service - thanks to the combining of e-mail with traditional 'snail mail'."

In summary..

[relrelrel]

Post offices in the northern state of Himachal Pradesh will take a customer's handwritten letter and computer scan it. Then the letter can be e-mailed to remote, high-altitude post-offices in this Himalayan region.

From there, the e-mails are printed out and then taken by hand to their destinations - many of which are located in almost inaccessible mountain areas such as the Lahaul, Spiti, Kinnaur and Pangi valleys.

Re:wow

[Anonymous Coward]

RTFA. It's not about money, it's about getting there when the passes are blocked with snow for half the year.

Plus, you only need one computer per town.

Bringing Technology to The Masses

[amigoro]

Bringing Technology to The Masses I believe this is a step in the right direction as far as dividing the gap between information "haves" and "have nots" go.

For example, I knew a Pakistani family in London who had relatives in the remote Karakorum region of Gilgit. The only way to get internet there was to use satellites, but this was beyond the means of many. So the London family had to rely solely on snail mail.

Thanks to the sheer inefficiency of both Royal Mail and PAkistani mail, letters took months, yes, months to get to the destination. However, if the messages travelled over wires as far they could, then both the costs and delays could have been reduced significantly.

Re:Speaking of the post office

[wfberg]

Actually I was thinking that even if most bills and letters are sent online, they would have less of a burden on their resources for delivering many packages and parcels (as well as the traditional hand-written letter or two), allowing for a very cheap rate and with high reliability.
But it all depends on how much of their income is drawn from bills and letters.

Delivering parcels is a lucrative business, and a lot of businesses deliver parcels for that reason; not just the post office.

Any national post system relies on business letters for the vast majority of their income, and it's a steady income at that. In effect, they subsidize the delivery of non-commercial letters.

In a lot of countries smaller parcels are also exclusively (by way of government monopoly) delivered by the general post office, just to make sure they make some cash on the side.

If you take away small parcels and business mail for the post office, most nations won't be able to keep their postal system intact, if not for raising either the tax burden or the prices of stamps.

The deal is simply that in order to deliver packages, you just bung a few in the back of a car, drive around and deliver them. If it's too far away, too heavy, etc. you just say "fudge that" and don't accept the parcel. You can drive along a different route each and every day.

Mail on the other hand is viewed as an essential communications medium (e.g. for the government to be able to reach the inhabitants of every home in the nation); that involves mail(wo)men walking/biking pretty much the same route every day, dropping some mail into at least every other mailbox. That's a huge resource hog, lots of recurring expenses, so you need a steady stream of income. Hence the monopoly granted (on letters and small parcels) to a single post organization in all countries I'm aware of.

Re:Old story - or I'm Psyhic

[Cruciform]

Yeah, Wired covered this in the 1990s.

But that just shows the lag between geeks and muggles.

You don't know what you are talking about

[Anonymous Coward]

The USPS is self contained per its money. Why do you think rates go up every couple of years? Because of inflation. They do not take any money from the government (although yes they are a government agency.)

cheap?

[madygoosey]

at a cheap 10 rupees (0.12) per letter I don't know if 10 rupees is cheap, you can buy a pack of chips for that much there. A pack of chips that size goes for a dollar here, paying the equivalent of a dollar for every letter doesn't seems very cheap. Why don't the post offices just get those people email accounts(liks a [e-mail]) or something and just have people email stuff to eachother at the post office only(so they don't kill business), and charge a lot less.

Re:In summary..

[intelligent poster]

And thats the rub see.. phone lines are difficult to lay down (and satellite telephony is prohibitively expensive) while satellite *internet* is relatively inexpensive.