10 Eurogiro News
India Post ramps up services in its giant Post office
network
India Post has a key role to play as a catalyst for financial inclusion and promotion of financial
literacy in India. The international remittances can contribute to this in an essential way and
India Post is collaborating with an increasing number of Eurogiro members to realise the potential,
promoting its Money Order Videsh service. Several projects have been launched to ensure that
the services provided across the vast post office network are modern and competitive. This article
details the most critical of these projects
India Post, with 155,000 Post offices has the
largest postal network in the world. Approxi-
mately 135,000 of these Post offices are in
rural areas. Hence, India Post is committed to
provide connectivity, affordability, and diverse
financial and retail services to every citizen,
particularly to those 60 per cent who live in
rural India.
Digital connection of post offices
India Post has embarked on an ambitious
‘Rural ICT Project’ which aims to bridge the
digital divide and enable the delivery of finan-
cial and retail services to the last mile. The
project aims to computerise and digitally con-
nect 130,000 rural post offices by 2014. Rural
hardware to be provided to the Branch Post
offices in the remote corners of the country
will include: Netbooks/ handheld devices (Mi-
cro ATMs), solar panel based power supply
units, biometric fingerprint scanners, smart
card chip readers, Digital Cameras, GPS.
The total cost of the project is estimated to be
approximately 320 million USD.
The rural Post office will become a self-suffi-
cient unit providing the entire range of postal
and financial services to its customers. In
order to enable the rural post masters to play
an important role as agents of financial inclu-
sion, a rural entrepreneurship programme
covering 130,000 Branch Post Masters is
planned. The focus of the training programme
is on financial management, micro-finance,
IT, communication and leadership skills.
Get the core right - ‘Project Arrow’
India
Post conceptualised and implemented a
transformational initiative called ‘Project
Arrow’ to make the post office, in essence,
the ‘window to the world’ for the common
man. This project focuses on getting the
‘core’ right, with focus areas being on mail
delivery, remittances, savings bank, whilst
modernising the ‘look and feel’, with special
emphasis on uniform branding and upgrad-
ing of Information Technology, and training of
human resources. The thrust of the project is
to transform India Post in order to make it a
vibrant and responsive organisation.
Core Banking services
Post Office Savings Bank has 260 million sav-
ings accounts with deposits of over 100 billion
USD. In order to offer the most advanced
banking solutions to its huge customer base,
India Post has engaged with a major software
giant to help India Post in its transition into a
state-of-the-art core banking service provider.
The project will benefit more than 200 million
customers of India Post.
Other initiatives
Within the remittance market, one of the new
initiatives of India Post is the introduction of
‘Mobile to Mobile Money Transfer’. It is a joint
initiative of India Post and India Telecom. It
enables prompt money transfer to remote
locations which lack internet connectivity.
Under this service, the remitter deposits cash
in a Post office and the payee receives an
SMS of the fund transfer on his mobile. The
payee receives payment from a designated
Post office by revealing a personal code on
their mobile through SMS.
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RURAL ICT SOLUTION
The elements of India Post’s digitalisation of its rural Post office network
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 11,12