India Post to open 650 payments bank branches by 2017

NEW DELHI, INDIA: The government today cleared a proposal to set up the India Post payments bank with a corpus of Rs. 800 crore, which is expected to be operational by March 2017.

India has the largest Postal Network in the world with over 1, 54,882 Post Offices of which 1, 39,182 are in the rural areas. On an average, a Post Office serves an area of 21.22 Sq. Km and a population of 8,221 people.

Telecom minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said, "650 branches of postal payments bank will be established in the country which will be linked to rural post offices.”

All rural post offices will be given handheld devices by March 2017.

The payments bank will be equipped with modern and emerging technology like payment wallet, unified payment interface, etc.

It will be professionally managed and a CEO will be appointed also.