Banks eye Postal department's payments bank branches to reach rural India

Banks eye Postal department's payments bank branches to reach rural India

Foreign financial institutions, including Barclays, Citibank and others, have shown interest in using the Postal department’s payments bank branches to reach out to rural India under the Centre's Digital India Mission.

The Postal department is one of the key drivers for this initiative, said Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad. He added that today around 50 financial institutions, including foreignbanks like Citibank, Barclays, Deutsche Bank and others, want to use postal infrastructure to take their services to the common man.

Speaking at the Regional Editors Conference, organised by the Press Information Bureau here, the Union minister said that the Postal department is one of the key pillars in driving the Digital India Mission.

Around 50 national and international consortium have shown interest in using the 650 upcoming branches of the India Post Payments Bank.

The government is planning to strengthen 2.50 lakh village panchayats through optical fibre network, which was started in 2011. For three years, total network laid was 358 km, but in the last two years, 1,39,000 km were covered and around 57,000 plus village panchayats were covered.

The second step would be common service centres and extending them to have internet service centres to offer entire service online. Today there are about 2.3 lakh centres in the country and many of them are extending to villages through internet-based service centres.

The minister noted that this infrastructure has started yielding results. For instance, 66.25 lakh transactions were recorded in 2013 and today that number is 2.07 crore. Today around 60 per cent of the railway tickets are e-tickets and many of them come from Tier-II cities and beyond.

Electronics industry

The Union minister said that $80 billion worth of electronics are currently consumed in India and by 2020 that figure will increase to $400 billion. Further, the duty collected on these electronic products is expected to surpass that of oil. 

All these things are backed by mobile penetration in the country.

Currently, there are about 1.3 billion people and 27 crore smartphones. To boost mobile manufacturing, the Centre is taking various steps, including creating an eco-system. The measures have started showing results, said the minister.

According to him, the value of mobile phone manufacturing was Rs 19,000 crore in 2014-15 and this has increased to Rs 54,000 crore in 2015-16. Further, it is expected to touch Rs 97,000 crore by the end of this financial year.