India Post: Innovation In An 150-yr Old Organization

I don’t watch TV regularly, but a show called Startup Junkies caught my attention as I was channel surfing. Start-up Junkies takes you behind the scenes of a growing start-up company, Earth Class Mail, as it attempts to raise funding, build a team, develop a prototype and find new customers and partners.

In a nutshell, Earth Class Mail scans your snail mail and brings it online. For a subscription fee, you can now scan and shred your snail mail online. TechCrunch covered the company a while back, the comments to the post are very interesting. The pitch by Ron (skip to 13:50 mins of the video – sorry MojoHD doesn’t provide an embed option), CEO of Earth Class Mail, to India Post was entertaining. It is hard to tell whether the India Post officials really “drank the koolaid” or just being polite.

It’s hard to see any value proposition for India Post and the average Indian, for various reasons – including lack of internet penetration outside the cities (5.3% in all of India). Not to mention, India Post is facing increased competition from private courier services and is getting creative to boost revenues and keep its staff busy. In the past, they’ve even experimented with retailing and services, including delivering milk. I went to the India Post website and they do have an ePost feature. It’s email-to-snail mail or vice versa service, and that makes a lot of sense, again considering the low internet penetration.

If you’re currently living in India, would love to hear stories of encounters with India Post services and your experience using ePost.