Tough terrain, no towers hit mobile connectivity in state’s 221 post offices

BHUBANESWAR: As many as 221 out of the 7,300 post offices in the state do not have network connectivity. Most of these post offices are situated in tribal-dominated districts. Owing to hilly terrains and lack of mobile towers, their offices do not have network or internet facility.
Officials said 202 out of the 221 post offices are in Malkangiri, Koraput and Kalahandi districts.
“The remaining 19 post offices are in Sambalpur and Jharsuguda districts,” Suvendu Swain, chief postmaster general, Odisha, said.
He added that the staff of these post offices feed the daily transaction data and other works via offline mode. If they are lucky, they walk down to the nearest tower where the data gets uploaded automatically with a faster internet connection. If they cannot find a network nearby, their accounts are taken to the nearest sub-post office for upload, he explained.
According to the Odisha Economic Survey’s (OES) 2018-19 report, around 11,000 out of 51,311 villages in the state do not have mobile connectivity. Out of the 11,000 villages, nearly 10,000 come under areas affected by Left-wing extremism.
The wireless tele-density of the state was 76.15% compared to the national average of 87.45% as on January 31 last year. The government report had stated that there is a requirement of special funding to set up more mobile towers in these uncovered areas for improving the tele-density in the state.
“India Post is trying to reach out to people through agents to popularise its postal insurance schemes and other products. It has recruited around 500 agents in the state for this purpose. Odisha has around 7,300 post offices with 2.2 crore depositors. Most of the people have Postal Life Insurance (PLI) and Rural Postal Life Insurance (RPLI) accounts in the post offices apart from other savings schemes,” officials said.
Dillip Das, an activist from Kalahandi district, said several branch post offices in tribal areas of Kalahandi district have no network connection. “Due to lack of network issues, real-time surveillance on these post office accounts will be affected and some corrupt staff will try to embezzle funds. Even some branch post offices do not have adequate infrastructure to run the office,” he added. He said the ministry of communications, which runs the postal department and also owns BSNL network, can easily install mobile networks in the inaccessible areas to facilitate its post office works.
“Even these network connectivity will also help the people, especially students to access online classes easily in this tribal district,” he added.
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