India Post holds Rs 22 lakh crore across 38 crore savings accounts: Union Minister Scindia
Guntur (Andhra Pradesh): India Post has about 38 crore savings accounts with a fund of Rs 22 lakh crore, while there are 3.8 crore Sukanya Samriddhi Yojana accounts with deposits of Rs 2.27 lakh crore, Union Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia said on Sunday.
Sukanya Samriddhi Yojana is a government-backed savings scheme for parents of girl children to build a fund for their daughter’s education.
Addressing the Gramin Dak Sevak Sammelan, Scindia said India Post’s mail network is being rapidly modernised with technologies such as conveyor systems, scientific sorting, Radio-frequency identification (RFID), barcodes, and QR codes to improve service delivery.
“Post Office Savings Bank accounts number nearly 38 crore. In a country with a population of 140 crore, this is significant. A corpus of Rs 22 lakh crore is being mobilised by Gramin Dak Sevaks (postal servants) across the country,” the Minister of Communications and Development of North Eastern Region said.
In hilly regions such as Jammu and Kashmir, Uttarakhand, and Himachal Pradesh, India Post will also use drones to improve the delivery of postal logistics.
Scindia said Prime Minister Narendra Modi has given a clarion call to “Reform, Perform and Transform,” and India Post will follow it in letter and spirit.
Minister of State for Communications Chandra Sekhar Pemmasani said the Postal Department’s expenditure is approximately Rs 35,000 crore, while its income stands at Rs 13,000 crore.
In Andhra Pradesh, the department recorded an income of Rs 600 crore against an expenditure of Rs 1,800 crore last year, while revenue rose to about Rs 850 crore this year.
“We are spending Rs 100 while earning Rs 40,” Pemmasani said.
There are 1.65 lakh post offices with 4.5 lakh employees across the country. Earlier, about one lakh post offices recorded no mail or parcel transactions; however, constant monitoring has reduced such ‘nil transaction’ offices to just 1,500, he added.
