The Department of Posts will roll out 1,000 ATMs in the next couple of years as part of its plans to hive off its financial services business into a bank.
Currently, the Department, which is also known as India Post, has two ATMs — one each at Chennai and Delhi. Kalpana Tewari, Member (Planning & Technology), Department of Posts, said the ATM roll-out is linked to putting the post offices on the core banking platform.
Since 2012, the Department has put 676 post offices on the core banking platform. By end of March 2016, it expects to put 25,000 such offices on the platform, which entails networking of branches to enable customers to access their accounts from and perform transactions at any of these networked offices.