  In this paper, we propose \textit{selectively precoded polar (SPP) code},
built on top of Arikan's capacity achieving polar codes. We provide the
encoding and decoding scheme for SPP code. Simulation results show that for a
target frame erasure rate (FER) of $\mathbf{10^{-5}}$, a (128, 64) SPP code is
just 0.23 dB away from the information theoretic limit at this blocklength.
Further, it is also shown that such codes possess better distance properties
compared to other contemporary polar code variants.
