The government has provided a fund of Tk 318 million (31.8 crore) to computerise the country's postal services, faced with a tough competition from the private sector, an official of the Bangladesh Post Office (BPO) said Saturday.
The Executive Committee of National Economic Council (ECNEC) approved the additional budgetary allocation in a meeting recently.
'BPO has taken a plan to modernise its services by using computers, which will start by July,' said BPO director general Mobassher ur Rahman.
In the first phase, the BPO will start computerisation of its four General Post Offices (GPO), 13 mail and sorting offices and 67 head post offices across the country, he told the FE.
The project 'Process Automation of Postal Department (PAPD)' will be implemented during the period of 2008-2011. The project will help the BPO ensure quicker service delivery, he added.
'Computerisation of the services will expedite the procedures compared to the age-old manual system, which is full of errors, costly and time-consuming. The process automation is guaranteed to be error-free,' he mentioned.
He also said the project is a part of the BPO's major new reform activities to change its service delivery system and its plan to bring down losses incurred by the postal department, one of the oldest government offices in the sub-continent.
The cash-starved BPO is seeking new avenues to reach the break-even point by late 2009.
As part of this plan, the government early this fiscal year increased the postal tariff 50-150 per cent, for the first time in over 17 years, to cut the losses. But officials said it would fetch only Tk 250 million in additional revenue.
In January, the department signed a ground-breaking agreement with the global money transfer company Western Union, under which about 450 post-offices would start delivering money, transferred through the US company, to recipients.
In April, the BPO also signed a remittance delivery agreement with two international banks, Standard Chartered and Citibank, N.A., and it is going to join other local private commercial banks (PCBs) to deliver remittances to recipients across the country in exchange of annual fees.
Officials said the search for an alternate income source follows the gradual poaching of postal services by private courier and mobile phone companies.
'Time has changed. We no longer dominate the money transfer or letter posting services to the cities in the country. And increasingly people want efficient and speedy services,' Rahman observed.
'We want to make our postmen hard working and efficient,' he added.
The BPO chief said the organisation is now prepared to take a substantial financial obligation, but the new income generating ventures will not be fruitful unless the vacancies are filled.
'Out of our 10,000 offices, only about 1,000 are in full use in cities and towns. The rest of them remain underutilised throughout the year,' he said.
The department, one of the oldest in the country, is desperately looking for alternative sources of revenue to cut its losses and make its services quicker and more consumer-friendly.
The BPO is one of the largest public sector employers, with a strong 40,000 staff working in over 10,000 post offices spread across every nook and corner of the country.
