Now, Pay Water bills at Post Offices
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
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