Jorhat, Jan. 10: Branch post offices in villages have been equipped with a rural integrated communication technology device under a pilot project in three postal divisions of the state to prevent fraud and to decrease the workload of overburdened sub post offices.

Rupak Kumar Chaudhury, superintendent of Sivasagar postal division, which covers Sivasagar, Jorhat and Golaghat districts, said 95 per cent of the branch post offices have been equipped with the machine.

"The advantage is that customers will get a printed slip as soon as an amount is deposited or withdrawn from their account. The balance will also be shown. This amount will also get logged into the central server and can be assessed from any post office linked by the core banking solution (CBS) system," Chaudhury said.

He said as nothing was needed to be done manually, it pre-empted wrong entries by hand and, thereby, fraud would decrease.

There is also the advantage of working offline and saving the data in a pen drive. The device is a slightly larger and heavier version of the equipment used to swipe debit cards in shops and uses a sim.

In Sivasagar postal division, of the 87 sub post offices 75 have been linked to the CBS and of the 541 branch offices 460 have been linked.

"With the supply of machines, work in the sub post offices have decreased. Earlier, the branch post offices used to bring all the accounts, which were manually written, to be uploaded into the CBS system in sub post offices. Now they are directly linked," Chaudhury said.

The two other postal divisions where these devices have been supplied are Darrang and Tinsukia.

The device has the potential to transfer money electronically.

It can be upgraded to keep track of registered letters or speed post letters if the requirement arises, Chaudhury added.