India and 20 other countries have started using this week the UN Universal Postal Union's new Global Monitoring System (GMS) to evaluate the quality of their letter-post service using Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) technology.
The GMS is a global system using RFID technology that is accessible to every Post, from industrialised countries and developing ones, a UN media release said.
Under this from now until December 2009, in a first phase of the project, 530 independent panellists from 38 countries will send 24,000 test letters containing RFID tags through 45 postal facilities worldwide.
The data collected as the test letters pass through special gates would be transmitted to the UPU and used to help postal operators identify service failures and improve operational efficiency.
Besides India, other countries are Aruba, Chile, Greece, South Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands Antilles, Norway, Peru, Qatar, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Spain, Tunisia, Slovakia, Switzerland, Togo, United Arab Emirates and Venezuela.
The UPU has been developing the GMS over the past three years and has managed to secure affordable RFID technology for use by all member countries.
Using an open standard, each RFID tag costs about $0.30 while other can be as expensive as $20 each.