HP, Infosys, TCS, Wipro in race for India Post's contract

Moumita Bakshi Chatterjee

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Companies Infosys Technologies Limited
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New Delhi, March 14:  

Global IT giant HP is fighting it out with domestic IT services companies such as Infosys Technologies, Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro for a Department of Post contract. The contract, which involves implementation of financial services solution, is one of the eight projects that the department is outsourcing as part of its IT modernisation initiative.

"Four companies have submitted commercial and financial bids and the bids are currently being evaluated. The contract seeks to provide connectively to 170,000 post offices in the country for anytime, anywhere banking," sources said.

While the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs last year approved the `India Post 2012' IT modernisation project at an overall outlay of Rs 1,877 crore, the entire project will be implemented through eight separate contracts. However, the break-up in terms of value for individual contract could not be immediately ascertained.

According to sources, these four companies have responded to the Request for Proposal by the postal department, seeking to put in place an enterprise wide financial management system for the Post Office savings bank and postal life insurance. The vendor will manage the system for five years.

Broadly, the scope of work includes supply, installation and commissioning of postal banking applications entailing core banking solution and ATM switch.

In addition to banking and insurance solution, the IT vendor would also have to install 1,000 ATMs and create mobile and web-based access for all users.

When contacted, the four companies refused to comment on the issue.

Multiple contracts

As part of its ambitious IT modernisation effort, the postal department is expected to hand out multiple contracts. The Rural ICT hardware contract involves supply and installation of rural IT hardware devices and providing network connectivity to 1.30 lakh Gramin Dak Sewak post offices enabling post offices to perform e-transactions. The rural ICT system integrator will develop the platform for all applications that will reside in the rural hand-held devices; and the core system integrator will focus on all applications that will run in the post and mail offices.

Besides the financial services systems integrator, other contracts include data centre facility, network integrator, mail operations hardware and change management.