Overview
For more than 150 years, the Department of Posts (DoP) has been the backbone of the country’s communication and has played a crucial role in the country’s socio-economic development. It touches the lives of Indian citizens in many ways: delivering mails, accepting deposits under Small Savings Schemes, providing life insurance cover under Postal Life Insurance (PLI) and Rural Postal Life Insurance (RPLI) and providing retail services like bill collection, sale of forms, etc. The Department of Posts also acts as an agent for Government of India in discharging other services for citizens such as Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) wage disbursement and old age pension payments. With 1,55,015 Post Offices, the Department of Posts has the most widely distributed postal network in the world.
Trends such as urbanisation, increased demand for financial services, increased funding by the government for the weaker sections and the rural sector, have opened up new opportunities for the Department of Posts which, in turn has necessitated development of new processes and supporting technology. The Department of Posts is also faced with twin challenges of increasing competition and continuing advances in communication technology, especially in mobile telephony and the Internet. In order to provide the best-in-class customer service, deliver new services and improve operational efficiencies, the Department of Posts has undertaken an end to end IT Modernisation project to equip itself with requisite modern tools and technologies.
The IT Modernisation project, intends to achieve the following:
- Wider reach to the Indian populace through more customer interaction channels
- Better customer service
- Growth through new lines of business
- IT enablement of business processes and support functions
As a part of India Post Project, the Department of Posts has carried out business process reengineering across various functional areas and has created To-Be processes that will enable it to achieve these objectives. In order to implement these processes in a sustainable manner, they need to be IT enabled in an integrated manner that improves operational efficiencies.