The khaki uniform, a bag full of letters and a black bicycle; the archetype of a postman took a beating on Monday as Delhi witnessed the giving away of the Post and Telegraph Department’s Meghdoot Awards for meritorious work done by its employees. Even as various post masters and postal deliverymen received their citation scroll, a gold medal and a cash award of Rs 11,000, it was Vijaywada’s Ch Sivaramakrishna’s work that highlighted the transition from snail mail to email.

As a student pursuing a commerce degree from Vijaywada, Sivaramakrishna had always been fascinated with computers. “Just after my graduation, I decided to work with computers. I quickly enrolled for a postgraduate diploma in computer applications,” he says. Yet family problems didn't let the young man leave for Hyderabad where information technology was building base. Instead, he joined the postal services. “It was there that I realised that a lot of computerisation could help the department,” he adds.

With the support of seniors, Sivaramakrishna and his team created the first computerised list of pin codes in 2000. “We made it available across the counter. What the customer just had to do was to tell us the place name and we would give him the exact code to use,” he says. But his affair with computers didn't just end there. In 2002, Sivaramakrishna was again part of a team that created software that kept a check of inventory in his postal circle, helping the department keep an exact record of all the stamps and stationary available and hence helping procurement.

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