The Department of Posts plans to inter-connect 24,000 post offices within two years that will allow customers to access their accounts from any of these branches and enjoy ATM facility.

“DoP will start a three-month pilot project on the lines of core banking technology across 122 DPOs after six months.

It will be then scaled across all DoPs over a period 22 months,” an official in the Ministry of Communications and IT told PTI.

He said the pilot project will begin after private companies start working on certain technology advancement projects, which is expected to start this month.

The DoP has a network of over 1.55 lakh post offices across the country but around 1.3 lakh offices are operated by either part-time or contract employees.

The official said savings account holders throughout the country will get benefit of the new services as their accounts are also managed by DPOs.

“Account holders in other post offices will partially benefit from this. Though they will not get ATM facility under this initial phase, but they will be able deposit and withdraw money from any post office branch,” the official said.

Core banking is services provided by a group of networked bank branches allowing customers to access their funds and carry out other simple transactions from any of the member branch offices.

The DoP has appointed National Payments Corporation of India as consultant for setting up ATMs across these branches.

The department has selected five major technology companies for its technology advancement projects.

Infosys will work on two projects on Rural System and Financial Services Integration. Tata Consultancy Services will work for Change Management, Sify for Network Integration and Reliance Communications Infrastructure for Data Centre.

As per data shared with Parliament, there were over 26 crore operational small savings accounts in the post offices as on March 31, 2012, having deposits worth Rs 1.9 lakh crore.

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