India Post to help collect power bills

Buoyed by the revenue mobilisation and the success in helping the Mangalore Electricity Supply Company Ltd (Mescom) with its bill collection through post offices, India Post is now planning to have a similar agreements with other power utilities in Karnataka.

Announcing this at a press conference to announce the tie-up with ING Vysya Life here on Friday, Meera Datta, principal chief postmaster general- Karnataka circle, said, "Providing bill collection is non-commercial and non-tariff revenue for India Post. Presently, we are in talks with the Bangalore Electricity Supply Company (Bescom), Hubli Electricity Supply Company (Hescom), Gulbarga Electricity Supply Company (Gescom), Chamundeswari Electricity Supply Company (Chescom) and we hope to sign a memorandum of understanding (MoU) shortly."

Mescom signed an MoU with India Post last year and has been enabling the consumers to pay their bills in select post offices. "The success at Mangalore has made Mescom to extend the facility to Chikmagalur and Shimoga districts," she added.

India Post, for the last six to seven years, has been growing this non-commercial business by utilising the existing infrastructure and manpower by incentivising the postal personnel involved. The Karnataka circle has 31 divisions with 9,829 post offices and about 30,000 employees.

"The circle of the 9,829 post offices, 511 are computerised offices, 124 modernised offices through which our non-commercial business is being offered," said Meera Datta.

"India Post has been servicing financial companies like SBI, UTI, ICICI, and HDFC. Recently, we have initiated address verification for companies by charging Rs 30 per request. Presently we offer this facility to telecom service providers. Our recent addition are the IT companies like Infosys who are using our service to verify address of new recruits," she added

On Friday, ING Vysya Life, part of the ING Group, tied up with India Post to launch the service of insurance policy renewal payments through post offices in Karnataka.

Announcing this, Rahul Agarwal, director-customer services and risk, ING Vysya Life said, "Our association with India Post is a value added service that we providing to our customers and this allows 80,000 customers in the state to make renewal payments at post offices." This arrangement is presently available through cash payment in rural and semi-urban centre towns and taluk headquarters initially and based on the feedback will be introducing cheque payments at a later stage," he added.

This facility is being made available to ING Vysya Life at only the computerised post offices in the state which number 511. "We will be charging the insurance company Rs 5 per transaction," said Meera Datta.