First, thanks to all that replied - I haven't expected so quick response.

Second, my apology for not explaining, why I have to stick with older version of CPAN.pm (1.7602). This installation runs on a machine which belongs to a large, international corporation. Although I do have a root access, I need to obtain business approval before any update, which practically is almost impossible.

So, using yum as suggested by checkley seemed to be a good choice. But then I run into number of missing dependencies and when I tried to solve first of them
# yum install -y perl-Date-Format

I got message
No package perl-Date-Format available.