Indian Posts launches eBill services in Pune

Usha Somayaji
19 April 2004

Pune: The Indian Postal Service, which probably has the largest network in the country, has extended its post offices as collection centres for a sister service, the regional telecom district of Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd.

The postal service at Pune has already launched an electronic bill collection service, eBill Post, for Pune''s telephone subscribers to pay their bills at post offices, with the payment advice being transmitted almost instantly to the city''s telecom department.

Post office personnel, equipped with computer and hand-held scanners, scan the bar-coded data on the telephone bill, receive the cash or cheque payment and issue a receipt for it. All this can be done in 8-10 seconds per customer, the only significant time taken is for counting the cash or entering the cheque details.

The payment details are batch processed the same day and transmitted to a central server, making it available to both the postal service and Pune''s telecom service, which in turn, transfers it online to its server, thus getting daily updated data.

While this may not seem significant in urban areas, where telephone bill collection centres are within easy access, the service would be a major convenience in rural and semi-urban areas where such centres are few and far between.

The advantage for the customer is faster customer service. Since the data is scanned into the system, the need for manually entering the details is eliminated, making for quick and error-free data entry.