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Kathmandu Thursday March 15, 2001 Chaitra 02, 2057.
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Corrupt
postal system
Having first visited Nepal early October 1990
for a totally inadequate three days, I completed my latest visit early September
last year - my sixth in 10 years. This is confirmation enough of the great love I have for
Nepal and it’s wonderful, genuinely friendly people who are truly something very,
very special and inspite of its appalling pollution and abject poverty.
But nothing in this life is ever perfect and it
did not take long to realise that Nepal has one of the most inefficient, incompetent,
corrupt postal systems in the world. Speak to any of the local Nepalis about this and they
laugh - they regard it as a national joke! And it would be funny if it were not so
pathetic.
When letters from myself were not received by my
first friends in Kathmandu back in 1993, one of these friends was so incensed he met with
the then assistant chief postmaster at Sundhara and was told that during the previous
winter a certain number of postal workers had been caught burning letters to keep warm!
I wrote the Vice Consul of the Australian
Embassy in Kathmandu back in 1993 about this problem and was informed, I was not the first
frustrated letter writer to raise this problem with the embassy and he kindly gave me the
name and address of the Chief Postmaster - no response from him of course.
Over these intervening seven years, there have
been innumerable outbursts of letter pilfering by the postal workers and these have been
reported to various chief postmasters, the Chief Commissioner/s of Police at Naxal, to His
Majesty’s principal private secretary (Mr Panday), and most recently twice to the
Nepalese Consul General in Sydney. Result? Stone cold silence from all concerned! Nobody,
but nobody in authority gives a damn about this situation.
Last year, 2000, was the worst yet experienced
by my good friends not receiving my mail. Of 22 letters written by me between January and
my departure for Nepal mid-July, only eight were delivered! An absolute epidemic of total
incompetency.
Another impassioned letter of complaint to the
Chief Postmaster dated 22 April 2000 unbelievably bought my first written acknowledgement
from any authority in seven years from Shreedhar Gautam, and following my reply, he again
responded with a further letter dated June 7. I mistakenly thought we were, at long last,
making some progress.
Being unable to meet with Gautam personally
during my July/August visit last year, I forwarded my entire file to him prior to my
departure, relating to the dates of the 22 letters referred to above, together with the
names, addresses and phone numbers (where applicable) of all my distressed friends. Having
now been back in Melbourne again for seven months I am still awaiting a response to this
file from Chief Postmaster Shreedhar Gautam inspite of a following-up letter from me dated
November 4, 2000.
From what I have heard and seen in Nepal, it is
well-situated in this communications age. One friend informed me there used to be long
queues at the GPO in Kathmandu every lunchtime, but now it is quite easy to do one’s
business without a long wait. More and more Nepalis are using fax, e-mail and the Internet
to communicate and have deserted the post office in their thousands. Can anyone blame
them?
For those of us (like this writer) who are
computer illiterate it is still very important we have excellent postal facilities to
communicate with good friends at home and overseas - it is a fundamental right - something
no responsible authority in Nepal is willing to accept.
The appalling litany of inefficiencies and
incompetence relating to the Nepali postal system I have outlined are unforgivable in this
day and age and I never cease wondering how many hundreds of thousands of other foreign
letter scribblers have been affected the same way as myself.
But the truly sad reality about this is that
nobody, but nobody, at a responsible level gives a damn! Shame Nepal; shame!
Trevor S Clarke
Melbourne, Australia |
