CHAPTER- I INTRODUCTION 1.1 INTRODUCTION 1.2 POSTAL SERVICES: AN OVERVIEW 1.2.1 INTERNATIONAL SCENARIO 1.2.1.1 Postal Services in Selected Countries 1.2.1.2 Some Important Dimensions of Posts–World Wide 1.2.1.3 Non Traditional Services Offered by Post Office-World Wide 1.2.1.4 Global Postal Organizations 1.2.2 POSTAL SERVICES IN INDIA – AN OVERVIEW 1.2.2.1 History of India Post 1.2.2.2 Present Scenario of Indian Postal Services 1.2.3 POSTAL SERVICES IN MAHARASHTRA- AN OVERVIEW 1.2.4 POSTAL SERVICES IN SOLAPUR DISTRICT 1.3 GLOBALIZATION AND RECENT DEVELOPMENT 1.4 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM AND AREA UNDER STUDY 1.5 RELEVANCE OF THE STUDY 1.6 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY 1.7 CONCEPTS AND DEFINATIONS OF SOME IMPORTANT TERMS 1.8 HYPOTHESES OF THE STUDY 1.9 JUSTIFICATION OF THE HYPOTHESES 1.10 OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY 1.11 JUSTIFICATION OF THE OBJECTIVES 1.12 ORGANIZATION OF THE STUDY 1 CHAPTER - I INTRODUCTION 1.1 INTRODUCTION: The present study entitled “An Analytical Study of Administrative and Operational Efficiency of India Post with reference to Solapur District” is an attempt to evaluate the administrative and operational efficiency, productivity of India post in Solapur District. The desire to communicate is a basic human inborn tendency. Since the early days of civilization, human being has been using various means to fulfill this desire. In a way, the development of civilization and development of means of communication have gone hand in hand. Communication media have come a long way from pigeon post in the olden days to speed post and e-post in the modern days. In the last few centuries post appeared as cheap and popular means of communication in almost all countries. Post offices and postmen have become central to personal and business communication world over. In India too, for generations of Indians as in fact for generations across the world, the post and postmen are part of conventional stories, poems, novels have been written and songs collected and movies made about the postman, the post office and the post box. Dakiya or postmen is one of the common but exciting subject for essay writing in school, certainly, for millions of countrymen even today, without postal service, there can be no life. In India postal services in one form or the other existed even in olden period. Those were logically developed during Mughal period. During British rule, Indian post office Act 1898 was passed, section 4 of the Indian post office Act confers Department of post the exclusive opportunity of conveying by post, all letters and documents from one place to another and also the special freedom of performing all supplementary services. Thus, through this act monopoly status was approved to postal services and those services were managed by the government itself. After independence, the same arrangement continued since then Department of Post also called as India Post , with its wide spread network has been central to the personal and business communication in India. With its 1, 54, 919 branches extend across the country. India Post and its postmen have become central to our lives. The postal services form part of the daily life of people all over the world. Even in the digital age, the post remains for millions of people, the most available 2 means of communication and message delivery. As in many other counties, in India, India Post has also shouldered the responsibility of mobilizing small savings since the beginning of 19th century. The winds of liberalization, privatization and globalization started blowing in India Since 1991, and the rules of the game changed for India Post. After enjoying monopoly for more than a century, India Post started facing competition for its core services. India Post was quick to realize the changes taking place in the environment and the need to adapt to changes, with changing environment in 1994. Director General DOP Mr. S.C. Mahalik coined the slogan “we must change”. This mantra was forgotten, only to be recharged once again in 1998, and more so in 2000-01. India post has introduced many new services and has been making efforts like computerization, business process reengineering, Post Banking, e-services in order to face the competition and satisfy the diversify needs of different part of the customers. The Department completed one hundred fifty years of its existence in 2004 and celebrated the year 2004 as sesquicentennial year. For postal administration the reasons for a study of administrative and operational efficiency may be even more vital. As a matter of fact postal administrations all over the world have been under a universal service obligations clause to provide a minimum defined service to all persons at uniform and reasonable rates. The Universal Postal Union says ; “Substantive and sustainable development in the information society of the 21,st century cannot be anticipated and achieved on a worldwide basis without integrating all existing and future communication infrastructures and services, including postal and other physical communication services. Postal services are not part of a sunset industry, but rather, will continue to play a significant role in the world’s economy and information society for years to come. The loss on account of performing these services have all along been made up elsewhere because of the monopoly position of postal administration. Recently, these administrations in many industrialized countries and somewhere else are facing a diminished portion or an abolition of the set aside areas and or increasing competition from new entrants such as private delivery companies in a liberalized structure of postal markets. This circumstances is also being faced by India post which is the corporate name adopted by the Indian postal system run by the 3 Government of India, for postal administrations like India post to carry out their universal service obligations. India Post needs to focus more on increasing operational efficiency and productivity so as to enable them to protect a fair and reasonable postal rate. Apart from this there is lack of technological support in rural post offices and the external post offices employees are on contract basis, they are not employees of the department, which creates inefficiency and low quality services, which affects on the customers satisfaction. Further it leads to opportunity to the private courier services in this sector. India post is facing the problem of low productivity and inefficiency in its operations. It also facing problem of competition from private courier services and technological advancement. Within India, Maharashtra is no exception to these problems. Though Maharashtra possesses a very important position in terms of total geographical area, Technological advancement, population, industrialization and consequently more urbanized part of the country, Maharashtra is also facing same problems like India in different sector. Within state of Maharashtra the Solapur District is a region under investigation also occupied a very important position both in terms of area and population. It has about 4.5 percent area of the state and about 5 percent population; it has about 11 Tahasils and 11 urban centers, according to 2011 census. It has 43 lacks population and about 200 Kilometer east west length and more than 150 K.M. south west. In view of the above the region of Solapur District is better in terms of transportation and communication as compare to other parts of Maharashtra. The district stands first in rank as far as the density of railway line is concern in Maharashtra. The Postal Services in the district are divided in to two divisions i.e. Pandharpur division and Solapur division and the head post offices are situated at Solapur and Pandharpur city. As like other region Solapur district postal services are also facing problems of low productivity, inefficiency due to lack of performance based culture and absence of close monitoring system in postal services. It is therefore, necessary to undertake a study of administrate and operational efficiency of India Post in Solapur district. Significance of productivity and efficiency: The use of scares resources are of very important in a developing economy like India. As a source of growth, productivity has moved to the centre stage in the analysis of 4 growth in developing countries during recent years. It is recognized today as a key feature of economic dynamism. Human progress requires finding new and better ways of doing thing so since the beginning of civilization; man has tried to develop techniques and tools that can improve the efficiency of the work. The same basic urge for efficiency prompt business enterprises to struggle for improving productivity. Generally, productivity is considered efficiency or performance. It is a measure of how well resources are used to produce output. According to James L. Riggs -"Productivity is the measure of how specified resources are managed to accomplish timely objectives stated in terms of quantity and quality". Productivity refers to the physical relationship between the quantities of resources used in the course of production. It is the ratio between the output of goods and services and the input of resources consumed in the process of production and services. Output means total production or services while input means land, labor, capital, management i.e. all resources etc. Productivity measures the efficiency of the production system. The efficiency with which resources are utilized is called productive efficiency. Higher productivity means producing more from a given amount with lesser inputs. At the level of any organization, productivity is an output - input ratio. But at the micro level productivity is a measure of performance of an economy, particular country. From a nations point of view productivity is the ratio of available goods and services to the potential resources of the country.