A post office where India’s diversity remained rooted

The 75-year-old post office, which once was a busy facility, still runs from a small shed

As the country celebrated the National Postal Day on Monday, the railway town of Shoranur fell back on nostalgic memories of a 75-year-old post office functioning in a shed on a tiny hill at Shoranur.

The Ganeshagiri Post Office functioning on the railway’s land is still in a shed, though the Postal department claims modernity.

Thousands of railway employees who worked in Shoranur in the last seven decades will have lots of memories to share about this post office that had once represented India’s cultural and demographic diversity.

“There was a time when you could see India from Ganeshagiri,” said P.K. Ramachandran, veteran cultural activist of Shoranur. Ganeshagiri represented India’s demographic diversity, as people from almost all States used to live in the railway quarters there.

Until the arrival of diesel locomotives, Shoranur used to be one of the busiest railway towns in the country. With people from across the country living at Ganeshagiri, the post office there used to be in constant touch with almost all parts of the country. But not any longer, as the railway infrastructure at Shoranur has shrunk in recent decades.

It was in 1957 that Ganeshagiri Post Office started functioning as a branch centre on Muthukurissi Hill. In 1972, when the country introduced postal index number generally known as PIN, Ganeshagiri Post Office was upgraded as a sub centre, and it became Shoranur-3 with the PIN 679123.

It was Shriram B. Velankar, an additional secretary in the Union Ministry of Communications, who introduced the world-famous PIN system on August 15, 1972. The first digit of the PIN marks the region. The second digit denotes the sub-region. The third digit marks the district. The last three digits show the post office under which a particular address falls.