TCS wins India Post’s Rs1,400-cr IT deal

IT major Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has bagged the Rs1,400-crore project of India Post for computerising counter operations, so as to achieve transformation to core banking operations, as the department hopes to emerge a fully operational financial services unit with banking and insurance operations across the country.

The project will take five years to implement and TCS will also maintain operations for another five years till India Post has its own operational staff.

An agreement towards this is expected to be signed between the two parties on Monday, official sources said.

"We will sign agreement with TCS on Monday for computerising counter operations under core system integration of India Post. Around Rs1,400 crore has been earmarked for the project," P Gopinath, secretary, department of post, said.

This is part of the Rs4,909-crore phase II modernisation programme of post offices, which would enable India Post to offer real time core banking services that banks currently provide.

Earlier, Infosys had secured a 700-crore contract for networking banking and insurance operations of India Post across 1,50,000 post offices in the country.

TCS had also bagged the mission mode e-governance project and Passport Seva Project from the MEA in October, 2008, a reversal of the earlier trend when foreign IT majors such as IBM used to corner most of the government projects.

India Post's IT modernisation project has three parts - pilot, phase I and phase II.

Phase 1 involved the roll-out of modern IT solution in six circles namely, Assam, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh.

The project included computerisation of all post offices, core banking solutions, including installation of 1,000 ATMs, mail tracking, customer service call center and introducing eCommerce solution, handheld devices for post masters for update on services like mails, money order etc.

The installation of ATMs under Phase 1, however, is yet to be completed.

Phase II involves roll-out modern IT solution in rest of the country.