Post Haste 2
However, BharatMail offers some value additions to its service. Users can receive scanned imprints of handwrittenletters through the ScanMail feature. It has also introduced multilingual email and voice mail facilities (all of these essentially aimed at cutting through language barriers). Catering to NRIs spread over 140 countries, the site has notched up one lakh users in the US, and three lakh in India, with a person in the Antarctica listed too.
“The site was conceptualised because there is a whole generation of senior citizens that is not going to get used to the Net. Besides, the registered user on our site is usually the son or grandchild who uses this facility to keep in touch with parents and grandparents who are not net users. This number is increasing by leaps and bounds,” points out Sunder P, Managing Director, Bharat Mail. “We provide a clean interface and use the infrastructure of the Indian Postal service to post close to 2,000 mails a day.” While this service currently does not generate any revenue, it does drive traffic to its other revenue-generating channels. Sunder does not perceive a threat from Indian Postal Service to his site. “Even the US Postal Service has been thinking about the same thing but has been unable to implement it. It will take a long while for the Indian Postal service to get its act together. Besides, there will be a surcharge to it, which is where we dotcoms beat them hands down!”
Dakwala , which set up operations in November 1999, is a similar enterprise. “It was set-up to provide a media face to our corporate website -Business OnlineIndia. It is not a revenue stream for us but purely a way to earn goodwill. and hence, we are not competing with the Indian post.” explains Suresh Nayyar, CEO, Business Online
“Initially the service was open to Indians as well, but the mail we received was unmanageable. Now we are open only to mails from outside India. The number is therefore considerably lesser, around 150 mails daily,” says Suresh. They have four people working exclusively on processing the mail, which is posted twice a day using the Indian Postal service. “The revenue we currently generate is enough to sustain the operating cost of the site. However, we intend to sell space on the printed letters, besides banners on our site,” he adds.