Bhutan has good and reliable postal services. However, delivery services in Bhutan tend to be concentrated in urban areas and so people in rural areas tend to visit post offices to check for and collect their mail. Recently, tele-centers have been established in some of the post offices, where people can check for their e-mails too. The average distance of the post office from a Bhutanese home was found to be 11.2 km. More than half of the postal correspondence in Bhutan is in English and about one-fourth Bhutanese postal clients use both English and Dzongkha for their correspondences. Along with the post office at Thimphu, there are agency mail offices and community mail offices that are scattered in remote and isolated areas across the country.
Community mail offices are often run by a government employee, a teacher or any literate person in the village and cater to the postal needs of a village. Because of the limited transport infrastructure, postal deliver is quite difficult and coverage in rural areas is negligible. It can take as many as eight days to deliver a post to a distant mountainous district. Thus, Bhutan Post is working in making e-post available to all the Bhutanese people, as it will be much faster, reliable and cheaper mode of communication. Electronic messaging is also expected to bring down operational costs of Bhutan Post to a considerable level.
The philatelists worldwide covet Bhutanese stamps. The first regular and unique postage stamp of Bhutan was issued on 10th October 1962. It was valid for both domestic and international use. The beautiful silk stamps of Bhutan with Thanka paintings on them and the unique circular grooved talking stamps that played the national anthem and folk songs on a record player, soon became a craze all over the world and earned international popularity to Bhutanese stamps. The Philately of Bhutan has earned the country good revenue along with fame and reputation. Even those who are not much of a stamp collector or a philatelist loves to buy these stamps as souvenirs and can learn many new things from them. Bhutan Postal Services release six to eight new stamps per year based on important national, cultural and traditional themes along with international popular themes.
