DARPAN

• The Union Ministry of Communications has launched DARPAN (The Digital Advancement of Rural Post Office for A New India) to improve quality of service, add value to services and achieve financial inclusion of un-banked rural population.
• DARPAN is Information Technology (IT) modernisation project aimed at realising financial inclusion of un-banked rural population. It offers core services to the account holders.

DARPAN Project 

• The project intends to provide low power technology solution to each branch postmaster (BPM). This will enable each of approximately 1.29 lakhs branch post offices (BOs) to improve service delivery.
• It aims to increase rural reach of Department of Posts (DoP) and enable BOs to increase traffic of all financial remittances, savings accounts, Rural Postal Life Insurance and Cash Certificates. It also aims to improve mail operations processes by allowing for automated booking and delivery of accountable article.
• It will also increase revenue using retail post business and provide third party applications and make disbursements for social security schemes such as MGNREGS.  The project has an outlay of Rs. 1400 crore and is targeted to complete by March, 2018.

IT modernization project 

• DoP has undertaken an end to end IT modernization project to equip itself with requisite modern tools and technologies. The IT modernization project intends to achieve wider reach to the Indian populace through more customer interaction channels and better customer service.
• As part of it, the DoP will carry out business process reengineering across various functional areas and has created To-Be processes that will enable it to achieve these objectives. So far DoP has established 991 ATMs across country, which are interoperable with other banks and common people have been directly benefited with wide network of DoP especially in rural areas.