Please Mr Postman, have you a letter from Babu?

KURNOOL: The ubiquitous postman has an additional burden to carry on his bicycle: bundles of letters penned to dear voters by Chandrababu Naidu.
In the villages, postmen has the additional task of reading out the letters to same to hundreds of women addressed by Naidu.
About two crore such letters written by the chief minister are reported to have been posted to members of self-help groups and other beneficiaries of government programmes.
DWCRA group members, beneficiaries of schemes like Adarana, rickshaw pullers entitled to accident insurance, girls receiving bicycles to go to school are some of the welfare beneficiaries to whom Naidu has written.
The letters from Naidu began reaching their destinations on Wednesday. According to official records, over 8 lakh people, most of them women, benefited from various schemes in Kurnool district, for instance. All of them are expected to receive letters directly from Naidu.
Postman S Ramudu delivered one such letter to Yerraguntla Laxmi Devi, an illiterate woman in Kotharamapuram village in Atmakuru mandal on Thursday. Her first question was: “Who sent it?’’ A puzzled frown knit her brows when Ramudu replied that it was from one Chandrababu Naidu.
Nobody at home could read, so could the postman kindly read it out? It was the tenth letter Ramudu read on Thursday.
Among other niceties, the letter announces that the “government has allocated you a house site and you should benefit from it.’’ There is a facsimile signature of the writer at the end of it.
Karivena postman G Siddaiah told TNN that he got fed up after reading the same letter out more than 20 times on Wednesday and 10 times on Thursday.
“I tried to avoid this chore on Thursday, but at least a dozen women wouldn’t let me go until I read their letter,� he said. “If I read these letters to everyone who receives them, it will take me three days to distribute the letters,� he said. He has so far distributed 150 in Karivena.
Locating the addresses is another cumbersome task for the postmen since most of them have similar names. “Luckily, most letters also have the names of the self-help groups. If we locate one woman in the group, she can give us the addresses of others,� Ramudu said.