Plan panel approves Post Bank concept with ATM facility

Soon, post offices in remote areas of the country will serve as banks and offer automated teller machine (ATM) facility. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Sep 27, 2011, 24:01:46 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Soon, post offices in remote areas of the country will serve as banks and offer automated teller machine (ATM) facility. The Planning Commission of India has agreed to allow the Department of Postal Services to install ATMs in post offices.

The postal department has a network of 1.44 lakh post offices across India with deposits worth Rs 5,60,000 crore.

Minister of State for Telecom Sachin Pilot said the department proposed the Post Bank scheme in an attempt to use the huge network of post offices to foster inclusive growth and ensure people in far-flung areas get benefit from the government’s welfare schemes. Post offices have 25 crore accounts apart from five crore MGNREGA workers.

The postal department has identified over 830 post offices where the ATMs will be installed. The department’s ATMs will be linked with other public sector banks too.

“Their (post office) saving account will be just like any other bank account,” a senior government official said. The department provides various financial services, including a post office savings bank, postal life insurance, pension payments and money transfer services.

The plan panel recently agreed to the department’s proposal and decided to sanction funds in the 12th five-year plan for installing ATMs in each post office. The panel had sanctioned Rs five crore in the 11th five year plan to conduct a study on the setting up Post Bank of India on lines of the ones in New Zealand and Japan.

The decision is aimed at making the post offices as an important catalyst in improving the delivery of welfare schemes, for which the Central government allocated over Rs 1,80,000 crore in the budget of 2011-12.

Already, a large number of people enrolled under Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGA) have their accounts in post offices where their wages get credited. But the limitation of being able to access their accounts during working hours of the post offices was a cause of inconvenience.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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