Tuesday 16 / April / 2024
Muscat: A unified postal system will soon come to Oman, according to the Muscat Municipality’s members.
Ali bin Abdulredha bin Dawood Al Hashmani, a member of the Municipal Council and a representative of Muttrah, said: “In a recent Municipal Council meeting, the National Centre for Statistics and Information submitted the National Infrastructure for Geographic Information Project, which talked in detail about the Sultanate’s unified address system, which is going to be used in the census of 2020.”
The meeting was chaired by Mohsen bin Mohammed Al Shaikh, chairman of the Muscat Municipality.
He added that the process of implementing the system will happen in four stages, beginning with its preparation, then making the unified addressing system database, followed by a field implementation of the addressing system and lastly activating of the address of the buildings.
Abdulmalik Al Balushi, chief executive officer, Oman Post, said: “The single unified address system is a necessary and important step that will benefit the post and logistics services in Oman, especially now that postal services are currently facing big and fast changes and developments.”
He added: “When it comes to the logistics sector, this system will increase the commercial competitiveness of Oman and reduce the cost and time spent on the current delivery system.
“As a post service provider, it will be easier for us to deliver the premier mail that people pay for in advance. But when it comes to the regular mail, it is possible that in the future, Oman Post will offer an additional paid service to deliver it to homes,” Al Balushi said.
It is a future step in the development of smart cities in the Sultanate, reducing costs for data exchange, accelerating government services, collecting utility bills and the role of the system in logistics and transport, navigation and inference services.
The project will include a building number, street name, city name, the governorate, the wilayat and the postal code. “Locating our favourite restaurant or a government office will soon become easier with the help of a new unified address system that will uniquely identify each location. The need for such a system was felt because both individuals and businessmen found it difficult and time consuming sometimes to locate places,” residents said.
In 2016, Oman Post started a pilot project at the Al Mouj Muscat, with residents of the waterfront apartment blocks being the first ones to receive the letters and parcels. Al Mouj has a community of 4,000 residents in total.
There are 19 post offices in Muscat and 83 across the country, where letters and parcels get delivered to the post boxes of individuals or companies.
Residents, however, welcomed the proposal saying that it will solve much of their time in hunting for places. “Sometimes we have to spend a lot of time in locating the address but hopefully, things will solve now,” Subhas, an Indian expat living in Oman said.
Then another resident said that the need for such a system was felt as the emergency services sometimes take a long time to locate some places. “This will help them tremendously,” Mohammed, a long term resident of Oman said.
