SECRETARY, DEPARTMENT OF POST’S STATEMENT ABOUT CABINET CLEARANCE OVER 1800 CRORES FOR IT & MODERNISATION OF POSTAL SERVICES ON 27.8.2010 NOW APPEARS IN THE NEWSHEAD
The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs approved the IT Modernization Project – Phase-II proposal of the Department of Posts. The decision is to computerize all the Departmental and Grameen Dak Sevak (GDS) posts offices in the country. The approval has also been accorded for creation of IT infrastructure including establishment of Data Centre, Networking of the Departmental post offices, development of scalable, integrated and modular software for all the operations of the Department of Posts. The Project will be implemented over a three year period covering 2010-11, 2011-12 and 2012-13. The total expenditure involved in this project will be Rs.1877.20 crore and it will cover all the Post Offices throughout the country in all the State and Union Territories. The Department of Posts will be floating tenders for procurement of hardware and development of software. Pilots will be held in rural and urban post offices. The final roll out will be completed by September 2012. Handheld devices will be provided to all the Grameen Dak Sevak (GDS) Post Offices in the rural areas and necessary software application developed. Banking solution will be implemented for the Post Office Savings Bank (POSB) scheme. Software Integration solutions will be developed for mail operations enabling tracking solutions for all registered and Speed Post articles. The Postal Life Insurance services will be available in all the Post Offices including rural post offices in the country through computers and rural ICT devices. Comprehensive training will be given to staff in Customer relations, application, IT management and system training skills. Background: The Post Office presently handles 654 crore pieces of mail annually. POSB has a corpus fund of Rs.5,63,000 crore. Significant trends like liberalization and globalization; urbanization, increased demand for financial services, increased funding by government for weaker sections and rural sector, make it imperative that India Post develop new processes and supporting technology.
