NAGPUR: The General Post Office (GPO) in the city, more known as a heritage building, may soon house a bank. As a plan to modernize post offices, it was proposed to start an India Post Payment Bank in 2012. As a pilot project starting April 1, the city GPO has been selected among the 47 offices where the bank will be set up. From next month onwards, the department will begin the ground work on starting the bank at GPO. The premises will cover at least 800 sq ft of this heritage structure and the banking operations are expected to start in next 5-6 months, said a source related to the project.
The bank at GPO will cater to entire Vidarbha region. Apart from GPO, other places where these banks would be operationalized in Maharashtra include Satara, Thane and Pune, the source said.
The bank's focus will be on catering to the rural market as majority of the post offices are in such areas. Initially, the focus will be on collecting current and savings account deposits only and no activities of direct lending such as granting loans or credit card will be undertaken. There will be no fixed deposit account also. Limiting to current and savings accounts will also avoid competition with government's small savings products that are also sold through the post offices. The savings schemes which have tenure of 5 to 15 years are similar to fixed deposits.
The department of posts will also be relying on the small savings accounts which it is maintaining. The Nagpur region itself has more than 58 lakh account holders for various small savings schemes, which is being seen as a customer’s base for the bank accounts.
The focus will also be on social sector scheme beneficiaries, direct benefit transfer payment, rural households and those not covered with banking facilities so far. The agents in villages will be given hand-held devices running on solar power through which the transactions will be recorded.
As a part of the modernization scheme, there are plans to issue a customer identification number to the investors on the basis of which the accounts can be operated from any post office in the country. The post offices are being linked though core banking system (CBS).
There are plans to replace the physical certificates issued on purchase of schemes like National Saving Certificate (NSC) and maintain a pass book instead. Entries of withdrawal and reinvestment can be made on the passbook, a source said.
Server link restored
The link failure which hampered work at post offices has been set right from Wednesday onwards. The server connection was established from Tuesday evening but the speed was very slow. However, by Wednesday enough speed was available, an official said. However, the counter selling small savings schemes like NSC, PPF will be closed on April 1 for interest calculation.
The department of posts is putting in place a core banking system (CBS) to link all the offices. This has led to several hiccups including frequent link failures which have affected the sale of small savings schemes.
The server had crashed for last six days as there was a heavy rush to invest in the schemes. Even as there is a rush during last week of March when investment is made into the schemes for tax-planning purposes, rates going down from April onwards further increased the pressure. Investors wanted to buy the products before March end to get the old rates.
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