It is a warm afternoon in early August in Sera Badoli. The road is nearly deserted. Around a kilometre beyond the bridge over the Sarayu river that forms the border between Almora and Pithoragarh districts of Uttarakhand, we spot a red post box gleaming in the sunlight.
That red post box – the only one in the area – might be unremarkable anywhere else, but here it is a big step forward. A new branch post office, the first in this part of Kumaon, was inaugurated in Sera Badoli on June 23, 2016. It now serves six villages – Bhanoli Sera Gunth, Sera (Urf) Badoli, Chaunapatal, Naili, Badoli Sera Gunth, and Sartola. Most of the people in these villages are farmers.
This happened two days after PARI carried my story ' The last post – and a bridge too far' on the problems faced by residents in the absence of a local post office. Sera Badoli now proudly bears the pin code 262532.
These six villages are in Gangolihaat block of Pithoragarh, but their post office was on the other side of the bridge, five kilometres away in Bhasiyacchana block of Almora district. “Such an irony,” Madan Singh of Bhanoli Gunth village had said when I first visited, “They still don’t accept us as a part of Pithoragarh district. It’s like we stay in Pithoragarh, but our address is in Almora.”
A few weeks after the PARI report appeared, I was back to check out the new post office. How much has changed for the villagers who, until now, have had to wait 10 days for mail to arrive from the nearest post office in Bhasiyacchana, and up to a month for a letter or money order from the headquarters – Pithoragah town – of their own district? They would often miss crucial interviews and landmark events as a result of the delays. Sometimes, they would travel 70 kilometres to Almora to pick up important mail from the post office in person.
Residents of the six villages that will be served by the new post office tell me that they celebrated its inauguration by distributing sweets. “In other places, people celebrate the arrival of new posts and appointments. In our case, we celebrated the arrival of a post box!" says a smiling Mohan Chandra Joshi of Sera Badoli. "Our lives won't be the same anymore.”
A small room with a table, four chairs and a steel cupboard make up the new post office. Kailash Chandra Upadhyay is the lone staffer, doubling as postman and postmaster. He was posted at the Ganai post office, which is around 12 kilometres from Sera Badoli, and has been asked to look after this new branch until someone is appointed. “The department said a postmaster and a postman will be recruited in a month or two,” Upadhyay says. He collects the mail every morning from Ganai and delivers it on the way to the Sera Badoli post office.



