Awareness DayKnowledge

World Post Day 9th October 2021 Theme- Innovate to Recover

Every year on October 9th, World Post Day is commemorated. The 1969 Universal Postal Congress in Tokyo designated the celebration as a way to commemorate the UPU’s founding anniversary in 1874.

World Post Day’s goal is to raise public awareness about the Post’s impact on people’s daily lives and businesses around the world, as well as its involvement in such developments. With a network of over 650,000 offices and 5.3 million employees worldwide and a public service provision from many governments, the Post system has unparalleled capacity to deliver services to anyone.

World Post Day is an appropriate day to pay tribute to postal operators, postal workers and everyone else involved in delivering the mail.

Theme of World Post Day 2021 – “Innovate to Recover”

There were concerns at the onset of this crisis that developing a vaccine to tackle the virus would take a long time. Individuals, companies, and organizations worked together in innovative ways to create vaccinations in just one year. The scientists and researchers who produced the COVID-19 vaccination are global heroes, alongside the nurses and doctors who risked their lives on a regular basis.

“The Post found a way to keep providing services to communities even after COVID-19 hit countries all over the world, including established supply chain infrastructure.

The mail kept going despite airline stoppages, border closures, outbreaks in sorting offices etc.New routes were created when obstacles blocked the way. Trains and vessels replaced passenger aircraft; new ways of operating, new ways of distributing, were designed by postal operators.

As COVID-19 spreads around the world like wildfires, postal operators are developing new and innovative ways of keeping the post going. Post has stepped in to provide everything from the supply of essential personal protective equipment, examination kits and medicine, to the distribution of education materials so that children can study from home.

Some Interesting Facts about Postal Services:

  • In Egypt, the first postal record known dates back to 255 BC. But even before that, on almost every continent there existed postal services in the form of Messengers serving kings and emperors.
  • Penny Black was the first adhesive postal stamp in the world to be used in a public postal system. It was first published in Great Britain on 1 May 1840, but it was not valid until 6 May.
  • The COVID-19 crisis has put unprecedented pressure on international postal supply chains. Cross-border trades decreased 21 percent from the same duration of the previous year between 23 January and 14 May 2020.
  • The United Nations is the only body in the world that is not a country or territory but allowed to issue postage stamps.
  • The United Nations is also the only postal authority to issue stamps, namely US Dollar, Swiss Francs and Euro, in three distinct currencies. The first stamps of the United Nations were issued in U.S. dollars on October 24 in 1951.

In the wind and rain, postal staff brace the weather and countless other hurdles to deliver letters all year round. In the middle of the pandemic, as life was unexpectedly locked down, different hats were worn by postal service workers, helping everyone fight the epidemic. Postal workers in India have given all of these, rising as corona warriors who kept working in the face of adverse conditions, right from the distribution of testing kits to the delivery of medicines and money.

Each year, on 9 October, World Post Day is celebrated. The event was declared a way of celebrating the anniversary of the establishment of the Universal Postal Union (UPU) in 1874 by the 1969 Universal Postal Congress in Tokyo.