Snag in postal website adds to agents’ agonies

Nagpur: The digitization of

postal

department seems to have backfired for the agents who allege that technical glitches are making their work more tedious rather than simplify it. For about last three days, local agents are unable to

deposit

money of

recurring deposit

(RD) accounts due to a server error in the website of India Post. After clicking on the

Internet

banking option, an error message stating ‘no services are available’ is being displayed. Agents informed that after the rules changed, account holders, who had their accounts opened before 15th, have to deposit their monthly RD before the same date. “Since the digitization, we first have to log in with our unique agent identities and prepare a list of our customers. After finalizing the list, we go to our respective post offices to deposit the amount,” said an agent. However, with the online facility going dysfunctional, the agents were unable to prepare the list and deposit RD amount. They fear that due to delay in payment, they will now have to bear the default expenses. “The automated system will not accept our list as we have missed the deadline due to technical fault. We will have to modify it and also pay extra default, with no fault of ours,” they complained. More the number of customers, higher will be the default amount. “I have to pay a total amount around 2 lakh. Even if one per cent default is imposed on every account, I will have to pay a large sum from my pocket. We can’t ask our customers to repay the default amount,” an agent added. Agents claimed that they regularly face hardships due to such snags in the server. “Even when go to the offices to deposit the monthly amount, we are made to stand for hours as most of the times, the systems are very slow. Many times, we are asked to come the next day,” they said. The postal department, which is moving to a core

banking

system (CBS), earlier too faced such problems. About a month back, TOI had reported about crashing of the server handling schemes while investors were rushing to buy government's small

savings

products before the

interest rates

were slashed on April 1. An official from the savings bank section assured that the default amount will be waived. “With the implementation of

CBS

, systems are slow but the website has not crashed. We will solve the problem soon,” he assured.