Rs 4,700 crore outlay for post office modernisation

VISAKHAPATNAM: Union Minister of State for Communications and Information Technology Dr Killi Kruparani today said here that Department of Posts has planned to modernise and computerise all the 1.55 lakh post offices in the country with an outlay of Rs 4,700 crore.

Addressing a press conference here, the minister said to make the post-offices citizen-friendly, the department, under the `project arrow', would modernise 2,000 post offices in the next one year in addition to 15,000 post offices already modernised.

The objective was to connect all the post offices through a single network, she said. All the postmen in urban post offices would be provided with handheld devices for updating the delivery status.

Talking about the IT sector, she said it will provide direct employment to 1.2 crore persons and indirect employment to five crore persons by 2020. The IT exports, at Rs 2.5 lakh crore today, were expected to reach Rs 20 lakh crore by 2020.