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All About The Dead Letter Office
They conduct post mortems for all the ‘dead’ letters and then give them a decent burial. The undelivered and unclaimed letters and parcels all end up in this ‘morgue of the mails’.
The officers of the Dead Letter Office act as detectives trying to trace from any available clue, the correct name and address of the addressee or sender. To do away with the morbidity of the terminology used to describe this office, the Dead Letter Offices of India WAS rechristened as Return Letter Offices or R.L.O.s in 1954.
The origin of the Indian Dead Letter Office can be traced back to 1837, when the detailed regulations about the postal system were introduced through an Act of Parliament. The act provided for the disposal of the undelivered and unclaimed letters and parcels. The first Dead Letter Office of India was opened at Calcutta (the then capital of British India) in 1854. With the increase in the mail, DLOs were started in Madras, Bombay, Lahore and Agra in 1862. A DLO was set up in Karachi in 1870 and another two in 1872 at Nagpur and Lucknow. Two more DLOs were started in 1875 at Mount Abu (Rajasthan) andRangoon (Burma) to ease the work and coverage.
The RLO derives its powers to destroy the letters and auction off articles with them under provisions of the Indian Post Office Act 1898. Point 39 in Chapter VIII of the Act says, “Final disposal of undelivered postal articles… (a) letters and postcards shall be destroyed; (b) money or saleable property, not being of a perishable nature,…be credited to the Post Office (or) be sold, the sale-proceeds being credited to the Post Office.
The work of dealing with the unclaimed mail at the DLOs had four distinct phases.
First attempts were made to find out the addressee with help of every type of assistance available, if they failed, then efforts were made to trace the sender. The letter was then opened and the contents read for clues. Only the Dead Letter Office personnelhad the authority to open letters which could notget delivered. Once opened, the contents of letters were considered sacred, so much so that the dead letter clerks were and still are forbidden to read any more of the communications than absolutely necessary to determine where the letters should go.
The employees at the RLOs, the little-known back end service of the Indian Postal system, work as decoders. They are entrusted with the task of verifying the letters and articles. The decodersbecome privy to hundreds of letters and the stories in them, which range from the banal to the bizarre, from the fascinating to the funny. Many of the letters and articles which end up at the RLOs are quite unbelievable. The most popular undeliverable addressee is God. Children write to Santa Claus or their comic book heroes. Others write lengthy letters to God, with fervent prayers or confessions.
How does the RLO do its functions? The RLOs are not computerised. Earlier, they had telephone directories, dictionaries, railway time tables, government civil lists, MP and MLA listings, lists of film stars’ addresses, so on and so forth. For determining the language used in their addresses, they refer to the Indian currency which has the scripts of 17 languages printed on it. They use magnifying glasses as aids. Many letters are intentionally posted to test the efficacy of the Postal Department. World are written in mirror images, jumbled as puzzles, written in a mixture of scripts etc., the decoders take every effort. I have myself received a letter addressed to me with just the sparse‘Anil Dhir, Bhubaneswar’. The RLO had written the rest of the address after tracing it out.
Among the documents that end up are passports, identity cards, voter identity cards and driving licenses. A kind stranger who might have found one lying around or a guilty pickpocket after emptying the contents of a purse, slips the cards into mail boxes. The RLO takes every effort to post these back to the owner the very day it receives them. Out of the parcels that end up in the RLO, the most common are sweets and food items, electronic items, clothes, jewellery, money, books and at times gold as well.
Housed in a nondescript room on the third floor of the Postal Stores Depot, the Returned Letter Office at Bhubaneswar is a relic in itself. Inside, there are old wooden tables and chairs, rusted old Godrej cupboards, and shelves with bundles of letters and parcels. There are stacks of gunny bags in a corner. Gopinath Soren, the DLO officer has been on the job since 2014. He took over from an officer who had been there for 28 years. The entire workforce of the DLO comprises just three, including Soren.
I found them sitting before plastic trays stacked with envelopes, magazines and parcels. They spend long hours trying to interpret weird squiggles and scrawls, and to decipher the postmarks. They have a lot of experience, as the job at the DLO is permanent, nobody gets transferred. Soren says that the strike rate is only 20%, the remaining 80% are destroyed. Most of the parcels contain books and printed material, hardly any valuables turn up. The itemsthat are totally untraceable are kept in an ‘auction list’,and every year, a professional auctioneer comes down to the RLO and conducts an auction.
The Returned Letter Offices in India have seen massive downsizing in recent years. The number of undeliverable letters has come down drastically because of increased awareness about pin codes and writing addresses. The counter clerks at the booking stage ensure that the address is written properly. The officials of India Post are contemplating to abolish the RLOs and merging the job of these offices with the PMG’s offices or GPOs all over India. Like the Money Order, the V.P.P. and the Telegram, this relic from the colonial era will too become history.