The postal department is a huge machinery of both manpower as well as infrastructure. What has the government done to put this machinery to good use?
Extract
of Interview with Ravi Shankar Prasad
India
Post is a fine 150-year-old body, which always remained in the background. I
have pushed them in a big way. Improving their operations, and pushing them for
bigger things.
Speed Post has been adjudged as the best courier service by the
CAG in eight states of India, and the report is before Parliament. Their
revenue has grown by 7.1 per cent …
We have also gone for a lot of
modernisation of the department. In 2004, we had only four ATMs. Now there are
913 postal ATMs. We have about 1,54,000 post offices all over the country, out
of which about 25,000 are regular post offices and the rest are rural post
offices.
This
vast network has been put to work for e-commerce delivery, and this is a very
outstanding success story that I need to acknowledge. What is important is that
the entire postal department is very inspired. We are supposed to play a role
in the field of digital growth and financial inclusion. The postal department
has opened 84,00,000 Sukanya Samriddhi Yojana accounts. All the banks combined
have opened only 4,00,000 accounts.
