THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, October 9, 2013 : Now,
consumers of the Kerala Water Authority (KWA) need not worry about the
limited number of counters and the winding queues to pay water bills.
The bills can be paid at post offices from Wednesday.
In the initial stage, the service will be available across five
districts — Thiruvananthapuram, Ernakulam, Kottayam, Kollam and
Palakkad. It will be a perfect gift for the State on the World Post Day.
“We have been running a trial of the water bills payment gateway for the
past one year in the capital district. It was found to be successful
and so we decided to extend the service to other districts. For the
first few months, it will be available in the urban areas of five
districts. Later, we plan to extend the facility to all the post offices
in the State,” K.V. Vijayakumar, Assistant Director of Technology and
Administration, Postal Department, told The Hindu .
The move is part of the department’s various initiatives to make post
offices the one-stop shop for services required by every type of
customer. Plans are also afoot to include electricity bills among the
list of services.
Computerisation
The computerisation of all the 1,506 major post offices in the State was
completed as part of the 11th plan. The work on digitising the
3,500-odd branch post offices, located in remote regions, will be taken
up soon. Once this work is completed, these smaller centres will also
become part of the integrated postal network across the State.
“The plan is to digitise the working of these branch offices using
handheld devices, smart phones, thermal printers and barcode scanners.
In places where electricity is scarce or is yet to reach, we will use
solar panels. Various information technology players such as Accenture,
TCS and Infosys are taking care of the various aspects of the project,”
said Mr. Vijayakumar.
As of now, the performance of 1,285 post offices in the State are being
monitored closely as part of the ‘Project Arrow’ initiative launched in
2008 to improve the quality of services in the core areas of mail
delivery, money remittances, savings bank and office service levels.
The ‘look and feel’ of the post offices is also being improved as part
of this project. The external branding as well as the interior design of
the offices has been standardised.
Plan to make post offices one-stop shop for services
‘Project Arrow’ to better ‘look and feel’ of post offices
No comments:
Post a Comment
Hmmmmm... what are you thinking? Do not forget to comment,It helps us to improve this blog and help us to make better. on