Jamshedpur, April 20: Postal department officials will now implement management skills in their work and better their services in rural areas.

Postal department officials are undergoing a four-day training, “Management training programme on rural business opportunity and emerging challenges”, to tap the market potential in rural areas and to overcome the challenges there. XLRI will impart the training that began today.

That is not all. The officials will also have to undergo yoga conducted by Manish Singhal, professor of organisational behaviour and the director of the training programme.

Various divisional heads, marketing executives, public relation inspectors and postmasters would be learning management tricks to identify their problems and come up with solutions.

About 120 officials are taking part in the programme which will take place in phases. Postal officials would have to undergo training in everything, from rural economy to organisational, managerial and personal leadership and marketing.

“The benefits of the programme would be reflected in the work. Last year, I had attended the general management development programme. I applied all those skills taught in the B-school, like sincerity and honest self-analysis, and tried to better myself. This year, Ranchi was awarded the best performing postal division award for 2008 by the department of post,” said A.N. Sah, the divisional head of Dhanbad who was earlier the Ranchi divisional head.

With services like savings and money transfer, the Indian postal service is yet to take over the role of credit lending to the rural population.

“There are about 1,55,393 post offices in India at present where financial institutions cannot reach. So, they need to take up the role of business core, business facilitator and intermediary functions in the state,” said economics professor Prabak K. Sen.