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Brickbats For Communication Services Crisis In Connecting Northeast
By: R.S. Mooshahary

I do not know if it is happening to others, but I am still receiving my New Year greeting cards; of 2008 of course; not of years prior. Some articles like the New Year diary and calendar, which my friends sent by post are yet to reach me. May be they have been filched in transit or hopefully they will land up sometime before the year is over to remind me that mail delayed is not mail lost.

In the good old days when the surface and air transport communications were rudimentary in North Eastern Region the mails within the region and outside used to travel much faster. From Odlaguri, my remote village in Gossaigaon sub division to Shillong, where I studied in the sixties and to the farthest place in the country from Assam, which is Kerala, where I worked in the seventies, ordinary mails would not take beyond a week to reach the destination. There were very rare cases of mails getting lost in transit. I was proud of the Indian Postal Department then.

Now I am critical of its functioning. In this age of fast communication, emails and private couriers postal mails take one week to travel within Guwahati city and to reach a little farther it may take a month or more. We in the Assam Information Commission have to postpone the hearing of cases often because the notices sent to the parties by post within the state are not delivered on time. As if to prove the point, I received two letters both posted in January at Gandhinagar and Udaipur as I wrote this piece on March 4.

I have to depend on the postal department to receive my monthly medicine packet from Kerala by the so-called speed post. It invariably takes up to two weeks to travel to Guwahati. May be it will be more appropriate to call it snail post instead because a gastropod would take about the same time to travel that distance! A few weeks back, I wrote a letter to the Chief PMG located here about the deterioration in service delivery. He responded with a commendable speed acknowledging the deficiency but assured that the department was in the process of adopting better strategies to improve things.

We remember that the Union Communication Minister with great fanfare inducted India Post Freighter Aircraft service in August last year to improve postal services in the northeast but it has failed to make any difference. There is no obvious reason for such rapid decline in postal service in a setting of advanced technology providing networking facilities. On the contrary, with the private players also in the field sharing the volume of mails the department should have been able to function with greater efficiency.

It is more a case of leadership failure to monitor functioning at the delivery levels and to act with corrective zeal than strategic shortcomings. The department should rather open up the entire mail service to the private couriers because inefficiency may the outcome of absence competitiveness in segments of mail handling operation. Monopoly in any form breeds inefficiency and the postal department is still clinging to it in some area of mail service depriving itself of the benefits of healthy competition. There can be no sensible reason to keep propping the department up when it has failed to deliver. Instead, the department should demonstrate that it could do better at lesser cost to the consumer through competition.

Telephone services – mobile and landline – are highly technology driven and ordinarily it should function efficiently. However, this does not happen and frequently the customers have to suffer because of staff skill shortage. BSNL is particularly prone to this syndrome, which frequently afflicts their “connecting India” operation making a mockery of technological accomplishment in telecommunication. Their public grievances response system has also to refine. Fault repairs are far from prompt. Sometime back, I had written a letter to the Chief General Manger located here complaining against the poor service but, unlike his counterpart in the postal department, he has not bothered to respond.

Railways in the northeast are mostly confined to Assam, which in comparison to other states are almost primitive. The service within the region is the most inadequate. Guwahati should be connected by interstate fast shuttle services to all important towns to enable people to do their work in the capital during office hours and return home by evening. There is also an urgent need to have a daytime super fast shuttle services between Guwahati and Siliguri where the road communication is often disrupted and the commercial and social activities are fast expanding.

NER is connected to the hinterland through NH 31 & 31C. Both these lifeline highways are a disgrace to the region. Years of neglect, corruption and inefficiency have made these highways unfit for vehicular traffic. As most of the materials including food items are transported to the NER through these highways where the truckers have to spend long hours negotiating the ditches and potholes amidst the dangers of bandhs and militancy the cost of carriage rises exorbitantly and the people of the region have to pay more rendering them poorer.

The first impression of NER of people entering the region by road – more particularly of Assam as it connects it to the rest of India by road – is that of a war-worn abandoned territory in a high state of devastation and anarchy. And that has a deterring impact on any entrepreneur or tourist.

Work is going on for making the highways four lanes but at the present pace, it will take years to complete it. Meanwhile no maintenance work is done, which means that there will be no motorable road until the new work is complete. By then portions of the new road will develop cracks and potholes. So the prospects of all weather roads connecting the NER to the rest of the country look remote even now. There are only promises not performance.

The river Brahmaputra can provide facilities for cheaper mode of transportation. All the developed nations use their rills and rivers to facilitate various economic functions. Brahmaputra was once a lifeline of transportation to the northeast. The British company like the RMS did much profitable transportation business through Brahmaputra. This mighty river has enormous potential to connect NER to the mainstream economically, emotionally and culturally through trade, transit and tourism both regionally and internationally in collaboration with Bangladesh.

A region can only be as good as its communication facilities enable it. NER cannot become an economically vibrant state until and unless the communications network functions efficiently. This is necessary for the social and emotional compact as well between the people of NER and the rest of India. The success of the Look East policy will be entirely dependant on the conditions of its communication services; so also its integration to the rest of India.

The writer, a former Director General of Police in Kerala and Director General of the National Security Guard and the Border Security Force, is currently the State Chief Information Commissioner, Assam)