Listing out the
achievements of the Government as it looks to complete two years in
power, Minister forCommunication and Information Technology, Ravi
Shankar Prasad today said during his tenure and because of a sustained
push, 20494 post offices have been connected under core banking solution,
which is more than the 16333 enabled core banking branches of
State Bank of India ( SBI).
"I pushed my postal
service to go digital, because postal service digitization is
integral to digital India. The first thing we pushed was core banking solution,
which means banking from anywhere. We have 25,000 district and
sub-post offices that needed to be digitized. When I had become Minister
only 230 post offices hadcore banking. Today, 20494 post
offices have come under core banking solution and we will
complete the remaining by April this year. Core banking linkage
of post office is bigger than that of the State Bank of India," said
Prasad at the Times Network organized Digital India Summit & Awards
2016.
Prasad added that the
number of ATMs in post offices has increased from 4 when he took over
as the minister to 850 today and by April the number will rise to 1000.
"By March next year we will bring in the payment bank of the postal
department," said Prasad.
Prasad listed another key
achievement of his Ministry, which is the delivery of e-commerce consignments.
"Parcel revenue had dipped by 2% in 2013-14, it rose by 45% in 2014-15 and
now has risen by 120% by January 2015-16. This is the scale we have been able
to achieve," said Prasad.
Stating that digital
infrastructure is important and has revolutionary potential, Prasad said that
when he became the Minister the total length of pipes laid out was 2092 kms and
optical fiber was at 398 kms. "Today, in less than two years we have laid
pipes in 1,30,000 kms of pipes and optical fiber of 1,10,000 kms," said
Prasad.
The Minister went on to add
that the number of Common Service Centers has increased from 83000 units when
he took over to 157000 today. Next year the government plans to scale
it by another 1 lakh units. Of these, 20,000 are being run by women
entrepreneurs. He added that the government would also be pushing a
BPO call centre programme in a big way to ensure Digital India as a mission
percolates to even the smaller towns.
Source :The Economic Times
