Thursday, June 2, 2016

Rahul Srivastava — India Post Offices To Operate As Banks, Network To Be Largest In World: Government

By 2017, your neighbourhood post office will start operating as a bank. The Union Cabinet has cleared a proposal for setting up of the Indian Post Payment Bank, which will become operational from March next year.

"By March next year we will launch payments bank of the postal department. It's going to be a game changer. There are 1.54 lakh [154,000] post officers. And our network will be the largest in the world. Even bigger than State Bank of India," said Communications and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad.
Mr Prasad also said that during the discussions for deciding the modalities, 60 international consortiums had shown keen interest to partner India Post for third partner delivery for insurance and banking, among others.

"50 top names are here including Barclays and others. Talks are on and a huge matrix will be created," said Mr Prasad.
India Post has the largest network of core banking solutions branches in India. There has been a steady rise from 250-odd in 2014 to 22,000 at present.
The postal bank eyes to penetrate rural India via the postal department's 1.39 rural postal branches. In the first phase, 650 payment bank branches will be set up. Initially, the target was to create the architecture in three years but today at the cabinet meet, Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked the minister to finish work by September next year….
The competition between India and China to dominate the global economy will be fierce — and interesting. They are approximately equal in population, but China is heavily wighted toward the aging and India toward the young, so India has a huge advantage demographically. Both countries are combine socialism and capitalism and will lead in forging a new "heterodox" system to replace the orthodoxy of neoliberalism as Western dominance declines. Presently, China's political system under market socialism with Chinese characteristics is much better organized than India's democratic but corrupt and some chaotic government apparatus, with different states taking widely different approaches. So presently China has the advantage in this regard.

NDTV India
Post Offices To Operate As Banks, Network To Be Largest In World: Government
Rahul Srivastava

10 comments:

Peter Pan said...

You and your "Chinese characteristics", as if that were an antidote to the problems caused by capitalism. If they don't do a repeat of the Great Leap Forward that will count as progress.

Globally, the future is genocide.

Tom Hickey said...

China is now in the 13th five year plan. The goal is to begin transitioning from an investment-export dominant economy to a consumer-base economy.

Peter Pan said...

The US underwent that transition without a plan. It was promoted as beneficial, but it was inevitable. China has no choice.

Tom Hickey said...

While the US was transitioning, it had to contend with the British Empire.

Peter Pan said...

You must be referring to a different transition. US was dominant in manufacturing until the early 1970s.

Tom Hickey said...

You must be referring to a different transition. US was dominant in manufacturing until the early 1970s.

Several important factors allowed the US to confront the British Empire successfully without going head on.

First, the Union won the Civil War. The British were poised to come in on the side of the Confederacy if the South had won. Because cotton.

Secondly, was the British embroilment WWI.

Thirdly, the Great Depression and the Red Menace post WWI drastically challenged the far-flung British Empire, which was stretched too thin.

Finally, WWII left the US as the last man standing that was not significantly damaged by the war, but actually enhanced.

The British leadership did not expect this result in their wildest dreams. After the successful American revolution, which as only successful because the British were tied up with more important matters elsewhere, the British fully expected eventually to be able to recover the lost territory and laid plans to do so.

The gods had other plans.

Peter Pan said...

What if the British had succeeded in retaking America? Were their values and aspirations that different?

Tom Hickey said...

American would be their vassals instead of the other way around. Bush would have been Blair's poodle instead of the other way around.

Peter Pan said...

That would be like Portugal running Brazil. The geographic size of the US and it's population would make it a formidable poodle, chafing at its leash.

Tom Hickey said...

However, if the British Empire had not collapsed, Britain out have even more people than the US under its control. India alone dwarfs the US in population.

It's all in how the worm turns. The Brits could never have foreseen this in the 19th century, which is about where the US-China standoff is today. Who can guess what the world is going to look like in fifty years, let alone a hundred or two hundred.

The US trying to hang on the hegemony it emerged from WWII with is not rational judging by history. It already is resulting in imperial overreach, one of the chief causes of the fall over previous empires.

See Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000.

Kennedy argues that the strength of a Great Power can be properly measured only relative to other powers, and he provides a straightforward and persuasively argued thesis: Great Power ascendancy (over the long term or in specific conflicts) correlates strongly to available resources and economic durability; military overstretch and a concomitant relative decline are the consistent threat facing powers whose ambitions and security requirements are greater than their resource base can provide for (summarized on pages 438–9).

Throughout the book he reiterates his early statement (page 71): "Military and naval endeavors may not always have been the raison d'être of the new nations-states, but it certainly was their most expensive and pressing activity", and it remains such until the power's decline. He concludes that declining countries can experience greater difficulties in balancing their preferences for guns, butter and investments.[2]

Kennedy states his theory in the second paragraph of the introduction as follows.

The "military conflict" referred to in the book's subtitle is therefore always examined in the context of "economic change." The triumph of any one Great Power in this period, or the collapse of another, has usually been the consequence of lengthy fighting by its armed forces; but it has also been the consequences of the more or less efficient utilization of the state's productive economic resources in wartime, and, further in the background, of the way in which that state's economy had been rising or falling, relative to the other leading nations, in the decades preceding the actual conflict. For that reason, how a Great Power's position steadily alters in peacetime is as important to this study as how it fights in wartime.[3]
Kennedy adds on the same page.

The relative strengths of the leading nations in world affairs never remain constant, principally because of the uneven rate of growth among different societies and of the technological and organizational breakthroughs which bring a greater advantage to one society than to another.[4]