From The Hindu Archives, March 3, 1976: Quick mail service between Delhi and more cities

From the Archives, March 3, 1976

New Delhi, March 2: Quick Mail Service (QMS) facility will be extended between Delhi and 16 more cities which are accessible by air. They are: Visakapatnam, Madurai, Tiruchi, Mangalore, Cochin, Aurangabad, Baroda, Indore, Udaipur, Amritsar, Jammu, Kanpur, Ranchi, Silliguri, Bagdora and Silchar.

This was announced by Dr. S.D. Sharma, Minister for Communications, at a meeting of the Consultative Committee of MPs of his Ministry, here to-day.

Dr. Sharma said by March 31, eighty per cent of the villages in the country would have the daily delivery of the dak. Already over four lakh villages had the facility.

All villages in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Kerala now had daily dak delivery. This had been done more by restructuring of the routes than by increasing the cost of operation.

The committee was informed that all State capitals would be linked to Delhi on STD before December 31 except those of Sikkim, Nagaland, Manipur and Tripura, which would have a “no delay service” to start with.

The Minister told Mr. T. D. Kamble (Cong.), it was proposed to introduce no-delay services from all district headquarters to the State capitals. He told Miss Maniben Patel (Cong-O) that special attempts were being made to improve the working of telex. Steps were being taken to popularise the PIN code.

Dr. Sharma informed Mr. Ramachandra Kadannappalli (Cong.) that Trivandrum would be connected to Delhi on STD on March 10 as part of the celebrations to mark the centenary of the telephone service. Another capital, Gandhi Nagar (Gujarat) would also be connected to Delhi that day. Fourteen more STD routes were being added by the end of this month.