Postal Investments and Rural Savings

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Introduction
Mobilisation of domestic financial resources has remained a major concern in many developing countries. Despite the variety of vehicles that are intended to mobilize and allocate financial resources, only very few offer strategies for meeting the needs of poor and lower income people. Savings are increasingly being acknowledged as a powerful tool for poverty reduction. Postal savings funds play a significant role in financing public debt and in a number of countries, the funds are intermediated through a variety of policy based financial institutions with developmental objectives, returning the funds to the direct benefit of the community of savers. Savings is the excess of income over consumption expenditure. Savings are meant to meet contingencies and raise standard of living of individual savers.

Statement of the problem

This study will be taken up with the main idea of studying the investors’ attitude towards the Post Office Investments schemes. Most of the persons are still not fully aware about the various Post Office Investments Schemes because of the lack of proper advertisements about the various Schemes. Most of the investors are influenced to make investment in Post Office Investments Schemes for tax benefit purpose only. Nowadays people are interested to invest their money only in Banks compared to Post Office Investments schemes. This can lead to a reduction of deposits in post office. Hence the researcher decided to study and identify the effect and the attitude of investors towards Post office Investments Schemes.

Need for the Study

The Indian economy is growing significantly and has various investment options but the Government of India has provided the oldest investment option. Still, the Postal saving scheme had not gained much importance. The changing postal environment presents an enormous challenge for traditional postal businesses, but it also creates a vast array of new business options and opportunities. The study will be undertaken to analyze whether the Postal savings schemes have gained importance among the people or not. Against this backdrop, an attempt will be made to find out the investment pattern of the respondents of a rural area in the outskirts of Tamil Nadu.

Review of literature

The views expressed by various authors have been reviewed in a broad sense so as to confine itself for reference.
Preeti Singh stated that Post office schemes are generally like the Commercial Bank schemes. They have a saving account, a Recurring Deposit account, Time Deposit account which are also recurring in nature. The savings account operates in the same way as commercial Banks through cheques and there is no restriction on withdrawals.



Hypothesis of the Study

Based on the above objectives, the following hypothesis will be postulated:
1. There is no significant association between sources of the awareness of Postal Investments and Rural savings.
2. There is no significant association between Schemes of the awareness of postal investments and Rural Savings.
3. There is no significant association between different types deposits of Postal Investments and Rural savings.
4. There is no significant association between personal factors and source of awareness of postal savings schemes.
5. There is no significant association between personal factors and media of advertisement about Postal Investment and Rural savings.