From Pigeons to E-mails, it’s time to extend

             About the Area: The Indian Postal Services, with more than 155,000 post offices across the country and close to half a million employees, is the most widely distributed post office system in the world. It reaches far-flung areas in India, including in high terrains, islands and other inaccessible regions. In addition to its traditional role as distributor of mails, in India, post offices offer savings accounts with bank-like cheque book facilities, and act as the distribution outlets for a few other government services. The plan is to develop it into a full-fledged bank and a financial super shop. With their reach, post offices can effectively help in governments ambitious financial inclusion plan.

          IT Outlay and Status: In early 2009, the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) approved the computerization and networking of post offices involving an expenditure of Rs 628.66 crore. This included the expenditure towards computerization of close to 7,000 post offices and more than 2,000 administrative offices as well as up-gradation of hardware of 1,772 post offices which were computerized in the ninth plan.

          In the second phase of the modernization, an overall IT outlay of Rs 1877.2 crore has been earmarked for modernization of post offices. This is for the period between April 2010 to September 2012. Rs 330 crore has already been utilized. The outlay include expenditure for rural ICT devices, rural connectivity and applications to rural population for services including postal, saving bank, postal life insurance and other related operations including MGNREGA wage distribution.

          IT Contracts Awarded: In October 2009, Department of Post awarded a 45-month IT modernization contract to Accenture to design a new enterprise IT architecture. Accenture is also advising DoP on the development of a wide-area network environment that helps connect all post offices on which various online services can run, and will study the feasibility of implementing an enterprise solution for the departments core banking and advanced financial services.

 By Devanshu Pandey ( Courtesy: freshersworld.com, January 16, 2011 )