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PAPER ID:IJIM/V.I(IX)/172-183/24
AUTHOR: Anupreet Kaur Mavi
TITLE :EFFICIENCY EVALUATION OF FINANCIAL SERVICES RENDERED BY INDIAN POSTAL CIRCLES USING DATA ENVELOPMENT ANALYSIS
ABSTRACT: The Indian Postal department under the Ministry of Telecommunications, provides a plethora of services including retailing postal products and services, transmission and delivery of postal articles & financial services like insurance, mutual funds, money transfer, e-billing etc. it serves the entire population of India owing to its strong and reliable network of post offices spread pan India. So it was of significance herein to analyse the efficiency of one of the prominent field of financial services provided by postal circles across India. The technique of DEA to measure relative efficiency of decision making units i.e., postal circles was chosen with extensive literature review. The paper is organised as follows: Section 2 briefly reviews the literature regarding the measurement of efficiency of financial services rendered by postal department across globe and India too; Section 3 presents the methodology used for analysing the efficiency in postal services; Section 4 deals with Data and Specification of Variables; Section 5 is about empirical results; Section 6 is that of conclusions; and Section 7 pertains to the Limitations and Future Scope of the study. The major results comprise of the fact that 13 out of 22 postal circles in India turn out to be efficient (objective value=1), the others turn out to be relatively inefficient with values ranging from a minimum value of 0.478128255 (PC 9, Himachal Pradesh) and a maximum value of 0.815996389 by PC 6, Goa. Also, it was empirically found that that the Postal Circle 9, Himachal Pradesh which is the least efficient among the 22 postal circles in India, needs to improve on account of insurance services (both PLI and RPLI), money remittance services (IPOs +IMOs-in lakhs) as well as Total Savings Banks in order that it reaches its peer efficient postal circles forming the efficient frontier. The increase in O1 is projected from 120899 to 252858; O2 from 3034 to 6.99; and O3 from 19.83 to 41 approximately.
KEYWORDS: Postal Circles in India, Data Envelopment Analysis, Efficiency, financial services.