Postal savings banks do not necessarily make micro loans, though they can, especially if they are designed to serve farmers. They have several useful functions: to make financial services -- primarily savings accounts backed by an implicit or explicit government guarantee and safe, cheap means to handle transfers and remittances -- accessible to all; to keep savings at home (rather than have savers send their savings overseas in search of safe havens); and to pool small savings and make them available to the government (by making the postal service invest savings into government bonds), so that the government can finance its public investment out of domestic savings at a low cost. If handled well, it is a macroeconomic institution useful to medium-rank developing nations.
What's wrong with the Grameen Bank is not that it makes microcredit available to some poor women but that it is a for-profit private-sector bank, it is represented as a substitute for what the state should do, and it is touted as a panacea for poverty.
The government can and should offer micro loans to people who need them. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>