WE were particularly charmed by the news received from the GPO that the Maharashtra Postal Circle Sorting Championship Awards for the year 2010 & 2011 were distributed to winners in the conference hall yesterday morning.
Apparently, this is a competition conducted annually to encourage Sorting Assistants to develop proficiency in Sorting both in terms of speed and accuracy. Each sorting assistant is given 4,000 letters and he must sort them out in 180 minutes. Yesterday’s function awarded winners of five people who had come through the Divisionals to reach the Circle level and the number 1 winners go on to the National-level sorting championship.
The three winners from 2010 are: M.V. Shedam and L.G. Mancharkar from Mumbai, and T.G. Tupe from Pune. Now this is interesting. Mr Tupe is also No.1 in the Circle championship for 2011, followed by A.S. Chaudhuri of Mumbai in second position. The former was sent up for the National Championship as well, and he came third. And so he gets to go to the UK, there to learn some best practices from the Royal Mail, which he will then bring back with him.
We wonder what the prizes were for the First and Second rank holders of the National Championship. As far as we know, the best postal services in the world, according to British think-tank Oxford Strategic Consulting, the US Postal Service is best in the world, followed by Japan and then Australia. Which may be the case, but we consider the Indian Postal Service the one best-suited to us, even though we have long since stopped looking out for the khaki-clad figure wearing chappals, carrying a heavy bag on one shoulder and a bunch of letters being busily sorted out as he walks.