Awareness Of Post Office Savings Schemes Among The Public In Coimbatore: An Empirical Study On Knowledge Levels, Investment Behaviour, And Accessibility Barriers

Walk into any post office in Coimbatore on a weekday morning and you will see the same thing: a queue of people waiting to pay electricity bills, pick up parcels, or send money home. Very few are there to ask about the Public Provident Fund or the Senior Citizen Savings Scheme. That is not because those products are bad — by almost any measure, they are excellent. It is because most people simply do not know they exist, or know only enough to be unsure where to start. This paper examines exactly that problem — the awareness gap around Post Office savings schemes — using survey data from 100 residents of Coimbatore district, collected between November 2024 and March 2025. We kept the analysis simple: structured questionnaire, simple percentage analysis, and four theoretical frameworks to make sense of the patterns. What we found was striking enough that we think it deserves a clear, direct write-up rather than one buried in statistical complexity. The headline number is this: 70% of respondents do not have full awareness of the Post Office savings schemes available to them. Word-of-mouth from family and friends is carrying most of the awareness load at 36%, while social media — which dominates how this city\\\'s under-40 population discovers almost everything else — accounts for just 6% of scheme awareness. Safety and government backing motivate two-thirds of investment decisions. Service quality is where the experience lets people down most. And yet, 68% of those surveyed said they would recommend Post Office schemes to someone they know. There is genuine goodwill here. It is just not being channelled effectively. For anyone working in financial inclusion, public savings mobilisation, or India Post\\\'s operations in cities like Coimbatore, these findings point to a clear and correctable problem. The post office has the trust, the products, and the physical infrastructure. What it is missing is communication that actually reaches people.