Bangladesh Post Office (BPO) has taken a set of proactive measures with a view to regaining its lost glory as well as for its survival, a high official said.
To this effect, the BPO has in the meantime launched a number of new services like Electronic Money Transfer Service (EMTS), nearing services of postal cash card, widening area for use of ATM cards etc and has also planned introduction of some more services.
According to the BPO official, the department on July 6 last had signed a co-branding deal with the state-owned Sonali Bank, which allows its 60,000 postal cash card holders to use the ATM booths of 26 banks for money transfer which was limited to 1,332 out of 9,886 post offices in the country since the inception of the service in 2010.
Apart from getting the opportunity to use over 3,000 ATM booths across the country, the card holders can now buy goods from 8,000 shopping malls.
Additional post master general (planning) of BPO, Sudhangshu Shekhar Bhadra said the authorities were planning to open 25 more co-branded ATM booths soon.
"About 1,200 co-branded booths will be set up on the premises of important post offices across the country within the next three years," he added.
Introduction of mobile banking is another new step. This long-expected service has been named 'Post e-Pay' introduced on December 16 last year to provide a range of financial services, including money transfer, bill payment, cash deposit and withdrawal.
The 'Post e-Pay' is now in a test run in four places of the country. Three of them are in Dhaka -- GPO, Banani and Sadarghat and another one is in Chittagong GPO.
The services will be expanded all over the country once the BPO gets a positive response from the customers and gains the capacity to handle the service.
Mr Bhadra expressing his hope said that successful operation of the 'Post e-pay' services would revolutionise money transfer services of the country and boost income of the state-owned losing concern significantly.
However, after yielding a good response from EMTS, the BPO is now planning to extend the service to all the 9,886 post offices by 2014 from the existing 2,700 ones," he added.
The BPO earned Tk 26 crore as commissions from the EMTS in 2012-13 fiscal year and Tk 28.23 crore and Tk 9 crore in the two previous fiscal years. The post offices that looked deserted before the introduction of the EMTS are now witnessing long queues every day, said Bhadra.
Deputy post master general, Zakir Hossain Nur, said the BPO has some other ambitious plans. One of them is Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT), introduced under a pilot project funded by the World Bank.
Under the CCT, fund is being directly given to 14,127 underprivileged mothers in Narayanganj. Each mother gets Tk 840 every month through using her cash card on condition that she will send at least one of her children to school.
"This scheme has been successful and we are going to introduce it in other districts gradually," said Nur, adding that two more such payment systems - employment generation programme for the poorest (EGPP) and reaching out to school-going children (ROCS) - would be introduced soon.
The EGPP is going to be introduced in Dashmina of Patuakhali and Bhurungamari of Kurigram to pay people for their labour. Under the ROCS, school students will be given stipends to curb dropouts.
However, both the high officials believe that BPO's bad days will be over in the coming years though critics say it would be difficult to successfully implementing the plans as the government entity will have to compete with the private sector, which is already much ahead in the race.
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