KOCHI: While the catchy tagline ‘Deliver anywhere in Kerala in 16 hours’ has worked wonders for KSRTC’s Courier & Parcel venture, it has also resulted in its customers queuing up with perishable items like vegetables and fish.
The quick delivery, however, attracted a lot of customers with consignment stocks of short-lived supplies. As a result, complaints regarding perishable goods transit began to pour in.
Finally the KSRTC has stopped accepting easily-spoiled consignments amid its burgeoning business that brought a total revenue of `8 crore to its coffers in the last 11 months.
“We began the courier service mid 2023 and after some time, we began consignments with a lot of perishable food items like mushrooms, fish and vegetables. They expect us to make the delivery in a very short span. However, we rely on our passenger buses to make the delivery. We could only ship the consignment in the next available bus with sufficient facilities. There began to arise complaints of damaged or spoiled goods due to excessive transit time, improper temperature control and the like, which are not in our hands,” explained an official.
“Now we’ve stopped taking perishable goods. People expect us to deliver the same quickly, for instance two hours to transport a fish box to Alappuzha. We could only ship them in the next bus after completing all the formalities. The passenger buses will take more time as they have to halt at stops and get delayed due to reasons like traffic congestion,” he added.
This is even as the corporation was able to deliver most of the consignments within 16 hours, with the average delivery time around 10 hours.
“We missed the schedule in only 5% of cases, that too due to unavoidable reasons. Even professional courier agencies utilised the service due to our reliability,” the official said.
Courier service a burgeoning business
While the novel venture helped the corporation to rake in `3.73 crore in revenue in little over a year of operations, the average monthly revenue has increased to `50 lakhs. The parcel counter in Vytilla Hub is the best performing counter with a revenue of `30 lakh per month.
“Now the most shipped consignment is machine parts. Regular customers now know the timings of long-distance buses, for example Kalpetta, and hand over the consignments just before the bus arrival. This will ensure delivery in minimum time,” the official said.The KSRTC now has 46 parcel counters in the state, besides the two outside the state, including in Coimbatore and Nagercoil.
“We’ve also plans to start counters in Karnataka,” the official said.
The corporation, meanwhile, effected a marginal hike in parcel services from February 10 in the wake of the high demand.
Challenges to be addressed
However, a major challenge is the lack of space and personnel at the counters. For instance, the facility at Vytilla Hub is a small cabin and often the staff is forced to keep the consignments outside the counter at public spaces.
Also, there is an urgent need to increase the staff strength at the parcel counters. Currently only three staff are deployed at centres like Vytilla hub.
While the management has promised to deploy more staff, the workers are yet to start receiving the incentive promised, 5 per cent for counter staff, 5 per cent for conductor and 5 per cent for driver.
“Providing the incentives will only result in higher business volume as the motivated staff would put in more effort,” said a worker on the condition of anonymity.