A resident of Bharat Samaj Society on Waghodia Road complained to Express Newsline, ``Only recently, our locality received no mail for eight to 10 days as the postman had gone on leave. We had to trek to the post office to pick up our mail''.

When asked about it, Ajwa Road postmaster Ramesh Parikh explained that the Waghodia Road postman's leave had been sanctioned at the last moment. ``Though we did assign the beat to someone else, he too had to go on leave suddenly. I could have assigned a third person but the others are not familiar with the area, besides having to cover their respective beats. It would have only led to further complications,'' he said.

According to senior departmental officials, delays in delivery was inevitable in view of the rapid growth of the city in the past 10 years and the zero recruitment of staff during that time. A senior official told Express Newsline on condition of anonymity, ``Incoming mail has increased 15 per cent in the past 10 years; new housing colonies have come up in the suburbs. With just 250 postmen the same number we had 10 years ago delivery of mail has become a stupendous task.''

A postman earlier covering a maximum of five km/day is thus required to travel upto 15 km daily. Moreover, post offices are often as far apart as five km, though the specified distance is two km, he said. Added the official, ``We tried to minimise delays by asking sorters to do overtime. However, the government has limited the overtime hours for the department. So there is precious little we can do. In the moffusil areas at least, we can recruit limited extra-departmental staff.''

Vadodara Region Postmaster-General Vijay Chitale, however, claimed that the responsibility for postal delays lay largely with the letter-writing public. ``We recently visited the Race Course post office and realised that every second letter bore the wrong pincode. After questioning some people availing of the services, I realised that few knew their pincode. Our sorting system, on the other hand, depends entirely on the pincodes. So letters with the wrong codes get misplaced while ones without codes do not get priority''.