Inauguration of Post Shoppe at Kolkata GPO by Ms. Kavery Banerjee , Secretary (Posts)

Ms. Kavery Banerjee , Secretary (Posts)

,Ms. Arundhaty Ghosh , Chief Postmaster General, West Bengal Circle,

Mr. Subrat Das  PMG, Kolkata Region

Post Shoppe , Kolkata GPO

Post Shoppe , Kolkata GPO


Source: http://wbipasp13.blogspot.in/2015/10/inaugurating-of-post-shoppe-at-kolkata.html

Pensioners may Face Criminal Action for Giving Wrong Information

Pensioners may Face Criminal Action for Giving Wrong Information –The move assumes significance as the government has taken action against several non-government organisations for allegedly misusing foreign grant for anti-national work.

Pensioners giving false information to the government while seeking its permission for joining an NGO orprivate firm within two years after their retirement may face criminal proceedings.

Making this clear, the ministry of personnel has amended existing rules and made it mandatory for the pensioners to declare that the NGO or the firm they propose to join is not involved in activities which are in conflict with or prejudicial to India’s foreign relations, national security and domestic harmony.

They need to declare that they have not been privy to sensitive or strategic information in the last three years of service, which is directly related to the areas of interest or work of the organisation, they propose to join, the new rules said.

The move assumes significance as the government has taken action against several non-government organisations for allegedly misusing foreign grant for anti-national work.

Besides, they need to give complete details of the company, they propose to join, like its PAN or Tax Identification Number, address and nature of work under the changed rules.

Pensioners will have to give a declaration saying they “agree to withdraw from the commercial employment in case of any objection by the government”.

They need to declare that they have not been privy to sensitive or strategic information in the last three years of service, which is directly related to the areas of interest or work of the organisation, they propose to join, the new rules said.

The pensioners need to give a mandatory undertaking affirming in the event of any of the information given by them is found to be false, the permission may be withdrawn without assigning any reason and that the government may consider appropriate action including “criminal proceedings”.

New Series of Coins with the Rupee Symbol to be issued by Govt. of India

Recommendations of Technology advisory Group for Unique Projects (TAGUP) Accepted in Principle and new Series of Coins with the Rupee Symbol to be issued by Govt. of India.

Some additional measures for good governance have been proposed in the Union Budget 2011-12. While presenting the Union Budget the Finance Minister Shri Pranab Mukherjee said in Lok Sabha that Technology Advisory Group for Unique Projects (TAGUP) has submitted its report and its recommendations have been accepted in principle.

The Finance Minister Shri Mukherjee also informed the house that the government hasapproached Unicode Standards Authority for inclusion of the Indian Rupee Symbol in international standard. A new series of coins carrying this symbol will also be issued shortly.

Press Information Bureau  Government of India Ministry

SAP in India Post; Post Offices to Use Global Business Solution

 

As part of CSI Project, TCS has incorporated SAP business solution in all areas of operations of India Post viz. Post Office operations, administrative works and finance/accounting operations.  Majority of CSI applications are working in SAP platform.

SAP SE is a German multinational software corporation that makes enterprise software to manage business operations and customer relations. SAP is a market leader in enterprise application software; SAP is at the center of today’s business and technology revolution. Their innovations enable more than 293,500 customers worldwide to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively.

SAP helps organizations of all sizes and industries overcome the complexities that plague our businesses, our jobs, and our lives. With Run Simple as our operating principle, SAP’s nearly 74,500 employees focus on a singular purpose that inspires us every day: To help the world run better and improve people’s lives. 

India Post has signed a deal in 2013 to use SAP software, a move that not only benefits Indian citizens, but also helps SAP towards its goal of a billion users by 2015.

SAP had an ambitious goal: reaching a billion users by 2015. Due to their large customer base, public service organizations (PSOs) in BRIC countries are an important component of helping to realize this target. It is a win-win situation: by using SAP’s innovations PSOs enhance their efficiency and provide better service, while SAP acquires a huge new user base.

SAP experienced a recent success in this regard, namely with India’s postal system. The government-operated Department of Posts (“India Post”), the world’s largest postal services network, recently chose SAP solutions to strengthen responsiveness and reliability across more than 155,000 post offices. With this implementation, the organization aims to deliver faster and more efficient services to the citizens, government, and private organizations of India.

India Post to improve automation of core processes

With annual revenues of more than EUR 1.1 billion and more than 474,000 employees, India Post is the most recent of more than 30 postal customers globally to choose SAP solutions with the goal of making mission-critical and customer-facing processes more effective. India Post will use SAP solutions to reengineer its business processes and increase its engagement with the Indian population via more customer interaction channels. SAP software will help the organization improve automation of core processes, including postal counter automation, track and trace, logistics post, e-commerce and customer interaction channels.

As the backbone of the country’s communication, the 150-year-old India Post plays a crucial role in the nation’s socio-economic development. It delivers more than six billion articles every year through its vast network of offices and touches the lives of Indian citizens in many other ways, for example by accepting deposits through small savings schemes, providing life insurance products, and providing retail services like bill collection and sale of forms.

India Post will rely on SAP applications including SAP ERP, SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM), and SAP Supply Chain Management (SAP SCM) to help increase process efficiencies and meet its business, social, and financial inclusion goals. It will also implement SAP solutions for streamlining internal processes in the areas of human resources, payroll processing and finance and accounts. In addition to running core and back-office operations, SAP Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise, SAP Sybase IQ, SAP BusinessObjects, and SAP Data Services will offer India Post the data warehousing and business intelligence (BI) needed for its entire operations system.

SAP in Hindi: A Top Solution

English is often the business language in India. However, the Indian government has mandated that communication across central government offices shall be supported in both Hindi and English. With its “SAP in Hindi” offering, SAP has demonstrated that India Post can enable business partners to conduct transactions through SAP software in either Hindi or English, creating a more inclusive IT environment. Suprakash Chaudhuri, Managing Director, SAP India, said “This is a defining win for SAP India in the Indian Government services sector, and our Hindi language capability was critical in positioning our solution as one with a difference.”

While the business benefits of this success are obvious, there is a larger social perspective surrounding the partnership with India Post. Urbanization, increased demand for financial services, increased funding by the government for the rural sector, and similar trends have opened up new opportunities for India Post, necessitating development of new processes and supporting technology.

India Post acts as an agent for the Government of India in performing various services for citizens such as wage and pension payments. The government also intends to use India Post’s vast network for its Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) scheme, which aims to cut down corruption, target beneficiaries better, and speed up the transfer of benefits to eligible individuals. Workers across India, especially those in rural areas, will be able to take advantage of Direct Benefit Transfer by using their existing savings accounts in post offices.

SAP and India Post form a part of India’s growth

Thus, through this deal, SAP also becomes an integral component of India’s growth engine. “With SAP, India Post shall address the challenges of increasing competition, technology obsolescence, and process reforms by delivering best in-class customer service, offering new services, and improving operational efficiencies. The reengineering of business processes using SAP solutions will enable the Department of Post to increase its engagement with the Indian population,” predicted Mathew Thomas, Vice President – Strategic Industries, SAP India.

Nandita Das- Indian Actress Honoured by French Post Issued Postage Stamp.

Nandita Das- Indian Actress Honoured by French Post Issued Postage Stamp.

Accenture, TCS & others spending millions to train workforce for digital services

Jochelle Mendonca & Neha Alawadhi | ET Bureau | Oct 21, 2015, 12.45 PM IST

Training has always been very important in IT firms' stratergy, as they train thousand of freshers to become IT engineers.

MUMBAI/NEW DELHI: IT firms are spending ever larger sums of money as they enter a skilling arms race to train their workforce to keep pace with the increasing demand for digital services.

Training has always been a key part of Indian IT's strategy -- they take in hundreds of thousands of freshers and train them for three months to create the armies of IT engineers that powered growth for over a decade. But the onslaught of digital technologies is forcing them to retrain and reskill the entire organization.

And it comes at a cost. At its investor day in New York, multinational IT giant Accenture broke out how much its training programme had cost.

"In fiscal year 2015, we invested more than $800 million in training and development by leveraging the latest digital technologies including virtual classrooms to deliver highly relevant training to our people at the point of need. We are investing at scale to build industry skills to be industry relevant," Pierre Nanterme, chairman and CEO of Accenture, told investors two weeks ago. Accenture has over 3,50,000 employees across the globe, with more than 1,00,000 from India.

Even for Indian companies, the costs are growing. The National Association of Software and Services Companies had said that five years ago training costs were about 1-2% of the overall costs of an IT company, but that has changed.

"The current number would definitely be higher. The 1-2% was the percentage of fresher training cost. Now, companies are doing mid-career training, design thinking, product management and some of those newer things which would be through the employee life cycle and not entry level where the bulk of training costs were earlier concentrated," Sangeeta Gupta, vice president with Nasscom, told ET.

Gupta added that the industry body did not have figure for the revised costs.

Training is also taking up an ever larger part of an IT company's time.

"We need to provide anytime, anywhere learning because at our scale, it is not possible to train everyone in a classroom. So we have online learning management platforms, iClass, an online instructor led learning program. All of these take investment. It is like running an internal online university," Ajoyendra Mukherjee, executive vice president and head - global human resources at Tata Consultancy Services, told ET. TCS has about 3,35,000 employees.

In FY15, TCS' recruitment and training costs rose 19% to Rs 360.9 crore from a year ago, its annual report showed. That number excludes the cost of the technology TCS builds to train employees and the cost of the time spent in training. TCS also said that on average its employees spent 10.3 days on training during a year. The training cost is expected to rise in FY16 as TCS continues with its goal of training 100,000 employees of digital technologies.

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Bengaluru-based rival Infosys did not disclose the money spent on training, but its FY15 annual report showed an increase in the number of days employees spent in training.

Associates at Infosys spent roughly 37 days in training, up from about 21 days a year ago. Middle management spent 2.94 days, senior management spent 1.64 days, while top management 1.83 days.

IT companies are also looking to get more value from the time employees spend in training.

"HCL is looking at methodologies that crash learning cycle times. Lot of time you tend to do training programmes which are too much content and very little application. Now, we are looking to balance the time for real-time application and content to a size that the employee can absorb," Prithvi Shergill, chief human resources officer at HCL Technologies, said.

Shergill added that investment in training would rise.

Letter-writing contest as part of Postal Week celebrations

Charles Lobo, Chief Postmaster General, Tamil Nadu, releasing Special Cover and Cancellation at Anna Road post office in the city. Mervin Alexander (right), Postmaster General, Chennai City Region, and K.N. Ramasamy, Director, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, are seen. —Photo: R. Ragu

Of late, letter-writing seems to be an activity restricted to classrooms. To introduce children to the joy of letter-writing, the Department of Posts plans to hold a competition at several venues across the city on October 13.

The department has lined up various events as part of the National Postal Week celebrations from October 9 to October 15 starting with World Postal Day on Friday.

Children will have to write a letter on ‘How did I spend my vacation,’ and ‘One day in my school’ in Tamil, English or Hindi and post it to their grandparents.

Postal Department officials said a copy of the letters would be taken to shortlist winners and the original would have to be posted.

The contest will be held at all postal headquarters. Participants may even get to be State- level and national-level winners.

Some of the other events to be organised include awards to staff members for their contribution towards postal life insurance and rural postal life insurance schemes.

Days will be dedicated to savings bank scheme and customers’ grievances meet. Post offices will have special camps to enrol customers in various savings schemes as part of Postal Week.

Source : The Hincu

History Speaks- Every successive Pay Commission has roughly tripled pay

7th Pay Commission – Highest pay hike since 1947 is on the cards

New Delhi: The Seventh Pay Commission is likely to propose pay hike for central government employees, which will be highest since first pay commission’s proposal in 1947.

 

‘Now is Seventh Pay Commission time’, which is also to take in to account living cost of central government employees cost of their appraisal.The first pay commission was constituted in 1946, while its submitted its report on May, 1947 to the interim government of India. ‘Living wage’ — the guiding principle for the first Pay Commission — is long past.

 

The cost of living measures the annual cost of necessities for one adult to live a secure, yet modest, lifestyle by estimating the costs of housing, food, transportation, health care, other necessities, and taxes.

 

Every government employee likely has a six-member family including his parents. So, Seventh Pay Commission is likely to increase salaries and allowances to minimise the impact on the cost of living for 50 lakh central government employees and 56 lakh pensioners including dependents.

 

Inflation pushes living cost, inflation, is an economic concept. The effect of inflation is the prices of everything going up year by year. A central government employee got salary Rs 3000 in 1987 under Sixth pay commission, now he gets Rs 80,000 with two promotion, this is called inflation, the price of everything goes up. When the price goes up, the salaries go up.

 

Every successive Pay Commission has roughly tripled pay. This means that simply by hiking up living cost for 10 years, a government employee would have tripled his pay.

 

The first pay commission was recommended Rs 55 salary to the lowest earning employee, second Rs 80, third Rs 185, fourth Rs 750, fifth Rs 2550 and sixth Rs 6660.

 

Accordingly, the Seventh Pay Commission is likely to propose minimum basic salary Rs 20,000 of central government employees, sources in the pay panel said.

 

The main reason behind the proposal of Seventh Pay Commission is to hike highest pay since 1947 on the account of Dearness Allowance (DA). The central government employees will get Dearness Allowance likely 125 percent at the time implementation of Seventh pay Commission. They never got such type of Dearness Allowance hike before implementation of any Pay Commission.

 

Dearness Allowance always merges with salaries and allowances under every pay commission’s proposal.

 

“The Seventh Pay Commission is ready with recommendations and the report will be submitted soon,” according to sources.

 

Headed by Justice Ashok Kumar Mathur, the Seventh Pay Commission was appointed in February 2014 and its recommendations are scheduled to take effect from January 1, 2016.

 

The government constitutes the Pay Commission almost every 10 years to revise the pay scale of its employees and often states also implement the panel’s recommendations after some modifications. The first pay commission was constituted in 1946, second in 1957, third in 1970, fourth in 1983, fifth in 1994, sixth in 2006 and seventh in 2014.

 

As part of the exercise, the Seventh Pay Commission holds discussions with various stakeholders, including organisations, federations, groups representing civil employees as well as defence services.

 

Meena Agarwal is the secretary of the Commission. Other members are Vivek Rae, a retired IAS officer of 1978 batch and Rathin Roy, an economist.

 

The Sixth Pay Commission was implemented with effect from January 1, 2006, the fifth from January 1, 1996 and the fourth from January 1, 1986.

Source: Sen Times