The government has cleared postal department’s plan to set up payments bank, according to telecom minister Ravi Shankar Prasad. By September 2017, all 650 branches of postal payments bank will become operational, he said. Earlier, the government was planning to open the bank within three years. The minster said the bank will be opened in one year even though the plan was to do it in three years. The bank will start function with a corpus of Rs 800 crore, out of which Rs 400 crore will be equity and the remaining 50% grants from the government. According to the minister, the payments bank will be run by a CEO and will be professionally managed, with representatives from some other government departments such as posts, expenditure and economic services. He said all ‘grameen dak sevaks’ in rural post offices would be given hand-held devices by March 2017. The department has 154,000 post offices out of which 139,000 are in rural area. At present, 22,137 post offices have core-banking facility.
