AIR MAIL NOTEPAPER

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23500, 14 May 1938, Page 18

AIR MAIL NOTEPAPER

INDIAN LETTER-WRITERS VOLUMINOUS CORRESPONDENCE (From Our Own Correspondent) (By Air Mail) LONDON, Apl. 20. Native Indian labourers are among the world’s most prolific letter-writers. Many of them are employed on estates in Malaya, but their homes are in India, where their friends and relatives live. Every week the labourers write long letters to their wives and children, mothers and sweethearts on the other side of the water. Indeed, they write such long letters that —since the introduction of the Empire air mail scheme —a special light-weieht paper is being manufactured for their use. Eleven sheets of this paper, together with the envelope, weigh less than half an ounce. Indian labourers in Malaya can, therefore, correspond with their families by air mail as voluminously as they like, without having to pay more than the equivalent of threehalfpence for a stamp. The problem arose almost immediately after the introduction of the air mail scheme on the India-Malaya route last February. Indian workmen employed in Malaya could not understand the weight restrictions. They went on writing their bulky letters on any paper they could lay their hands on. and were astonished to find that when their budgets of news reached home their wives had additional postage to pay. Their employers solved the problem for them. They ordered large quantities of flimsy, light-weight paper and distributed it free among the workmen. Thus another international crisis has been averted.