Hyderabad General Post Office will retain its Group A status after the postal department dropped a proposal to downgrade the city’s main post office to Group B, Telangana Chief Postmaster General D.S.V.R. Murthy told Deccan Chronicle.
“As of now there is no proposal of downgrading the GPO, Hyderabad,” Murthy said, confirming that the proposed change would not proceed. The decision has brought relief to postal unions and employees who had opposed the plan.
The proposal became public on September 26, when AIMIM president Asaduddin Owaisi wrote to the Union Ministry of Communications urging it to withdraw the downgrade plan. Several postal unions also submitted representations against the move and approached MP Raghunandan.
According to the unions, retaining the existing status is significant for about 150 clerical staff, 80 postmen and nearly 30 Class IV employees working at Hyderabad GPO. The unions welcomed the department’s decision and said they were thankful that the proposal had been dropped.
Murthy explained that the department had initially considered shifting the time-scale officer attached to Hyderabad GPO to Sangareddy postal division. The move was intended to upgrade Sangareddy into a senior postal division without creating new appointments, according to the explanation reported by Deccan Chronicle.
The decision was also welcomed by Sagi Srinivas Raju, secretary of the Hyderabad Philatelic and Hobbies Society. The GPO has a long institutional history in the city. Its building was inaugurated on August 20, 1966, by Satyanarayan Sinha, then minister for communications and parliamentary affairs. It marked its golden jubilee in 2016.
The facility was modernised as a General Post Office on August 8, 1985, and dedicated to the public by N.T. Rama Rao, who was then Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh. Its continued Group A status preserves the administrative position of one of Hyderabad’s longstanding public-facing postal institutions.
The decision comes within a large postal network in Telangana. Recent figures cited in the report show that Telangana Circle has 36 head post offices, 759 sub-post offices and 5,424 branch post offices. The network is supported by 6,514 departmental employees and 10,623 Gramin Dak Sevaks.
The postal department has also issued 1,86,202 appointment offers through 17 Rozgar Mela tranches, including 1,51,348 offers to Gramin Dak Sevaks. In Telangana Circle, 1,272 candidates received offers, of whom 1,123 were Gramin Dak Sevaks.
The Chief Postmaster General’s statement leaves Hyderabad GPO’s existing status unchanged for now, while the proposed administrative arrangement involving Sangareddy will not result in its downgrade.
