YemKay

Those who think Postal Services are not meant for this generation, rethink!!!. India post has proposed to replace the age old Postal Index (PIN) code with 8 digit Postal Address Locator (PAL) code. In the past we have seen such revolutions in Telecom industry, when the number of digits in our telephone number increased from five to six and then to eight. Now we will soon see our pin codes also changing this way, but your new code is not going to be your old code prefixed with the state/city code.

As per this proposal, the new PAL code will have 8 digits. First two digits denote the state, next two digits denote either the metro or the district. For a metro locality, the fifth digit denotes its zone and the last three digits denote the locality. For a non-metro locality, the 5th digit denotes a town in the district and the last 3 digits denote the village.

For metro localities

22015248

{State}{Metro City}{Metro Zone}{Locality}

For non-metro localities

22106178

{State}{District}{Town}{village}

In third and fourth digits, the range 01 to 09 is used to denote a metro in the state and values 10 to 99 are used for districts. So, this code can accommodate 9 metros and 90 districts in a state, which is good enough even for the largest state U.P, which has 70 districts. It’s imminent that the code for state capital will be 01. Metro, in this context, doesn’t mean metropolitan cities but municipal cities. So second tier cities like Coimbatore, Pune, Surat, Mysore will be identified from each state and metro codes are assigned for them. There can be 9 such cities from a state.

If the fifth digit is between one and five, it denotes a zone in metro and other values denote a town in the district. As this system accommodates just 5 towns in a district, it’s not clear on what basis such towns are identified from districts.

At maximum, the system supports 9999 villages in a district or same number of localities in a metro. So the smallest entity identified by this code will be a village or a metro locality, regardless of whether it has a post office or not. A question arises here is that a small district in the state of Pondichery and the Mumbai city, which has a population of 2 crore, will get the same number of slots for their localities according to this design. I think, for postal department geography is more important than the demography. So Mumbai with an area comparable with that of a district will get the same number of slots for its localities. Rather I feel, by allotting single digit metro code value (01 to 09) in the third and fourth positions, they are wasting a precious digit in the PAL code. We could increase the number of locality slots for a metro by 10 fold, if just the third digit is used for the metro code and the last 5 digits are used for the localities. India post encourages citizens to send their views on the new PAL system. Note the email address - deputydgpoi at gmail.com. I’ve just sent the above suggestion to this email.

The proposal document claims that the first half of the code will be used to segregate the outgoing mails and second half will be used in delivering the incoming mails.

Another interesting aspect I noted from this document is about the increasing passion in Government organizations like India Post and BSNL. See this excerpt from a slide for popularizing the PAL system,

Launch a bold and innovative publicity campaign for 2 months before introduction that should catch the imagination of the nation like wild fire - Something like KBC or IPL

Would you have imagined this passion in a Govt. organization? Though they are far behind the private organizations in terms of liberal decision making, there are already promising signs of improvement. One should note that unlike growth in the private sector, the growth in Government sector triggers growth of the Nation by multifold.