The good old post office just around the corner is taking the first step towards offering anytime anywhere banking.

Tollygunge head post office on Thursday became the first in Bengal to join the 2,000-plus departmental post offices which have started offering core banking solutions (CBS) over the year. This means a customer can do his transactions from any of these CBS post offices with equal ease.

The service was inaugurated by Kavery Banerjee, secretary, department of posts, government of India.

'With 1,55,000 post offices, ours is the largest postal network in the world. Even a big country like Russia has 80,000. We have undertaken a massive modernisation drive by which we plan to connect all post offices over a Wide Area Network. A data centre has been set up in Navi Mumbai where everything is being centrally stored,' she said.

Over the last year, about 26,000 post offices have been connected, of which around 2,000 are offering CBS.

With all financial services being offered by Tollygunge head post office now being available through the core banking platform, the immediate benefits for the 1,26,335 account-holders are facility of deposit and withdrawal from their savings bank accounts and spot encashment of Kisan Vikas Patras and National Savings Certificates from CBS post offices anywhere. 'In our old system there was a time lag in encashment as a verification needed to be carried out if a customer wanted to do so at a post office other than where he had bought it from. Now the data can be pulled out from anywhere. Transactions will be faster,' she added.

The certificates will continue to be issued in paper format, though. 'There is no talk of dematerialising them.'

By March 2015, all 47 head post offices in Bengal will offer core banking services, said Arundhaty Ghosh, chief postmaster general, West Bengal circle. 'Next in line are Siliguri on December 22 and Chinsurah on December 29,' said Subrat Das, postmaster general, Calcutta.

Henceforth, all customers at these post offices will have to open a savings bank account as instead of issuing cheques, encashable at any bank, the post office will deposit the interest or the matured amount electronically in one's postal account.

In the rural post offices where connectivity is an issue, handheld devices will be used for offline transactions and the data will be uploaded from the nearest sub-office to which it is linked.

In the next phase, ATM booths will be added to 1,000 post offices across India.

The process had started nationally as a pilot project in seven postal circles in 2012. 'We hope by 2016, you will see post offices in new avatars,' Banerjee said.