DNA Edit: Pan-India Digi Gaon - Digital India is expanding its footprint

Not for nothing are Aadhaar and PAN the country’s ultimate enablers. Despite the many naysayers and legion of doubting Thomases, the two cards chug along merrily. They are, without doubt, the most important pieces of documentation that a person needs in her wallet.

Now they are set to get even bigger. Keeping in line with the government’s policy of expanding the impact of Digital India, there is no better way to make a point than to provide conveniences to the public, making their lives easier.

Users will be able to update their Aadhaar or PAN details or pay a bill while sitting at the airport or waiting for a train or metro in New Delhi and Mumbai. How’s that for spreading the good word? The convenience comes courtesy the government’s plans to expand its network of Common Service Centres (CSCs), which till now have been access points for delivery of essential public utility services, social welfare schemes, healthcare, financial, education and agriculture services, apart from host of B2C services to citizens in rural and remote areas of the country.

It is a pan-India network catering across the regional, geographic, linguistic and cultural diversity of the country, enabling the government’s mandate of a socially, financially and digitally inclusive society. Now, it is all set to be expanded at major urban locations, including important transit points.

CSCs can be accessed to book railway tickets and passport services, pay bills, gain information about telemedicine and banking services. This framework has already been implemented in rural areas as part of the Digital India initiative. Initially, CSCs will be set up in about 25,000 post offices, 15 airports, 200 railway stations, 50 metro stations in Delhi and Mumbai and 2,000 urban slums across the country.

Their number will be increased depending on the footfall and level of transactions in the first year. Currently, there are about 3.8 lakh CSCs across India, with 2.64 lakh in rural areas. About 73,636 of these are managed by women village level entrepreneurs (VLEs).

In the rural areas, CSCs are a single-access point for delivery of services electronically. A Rs 15,000-crore proposal for one lakh digital villages has been pitched by CSC eGovernance Services Ltd, the nodal point for the digital villages project. The main objective of ‘Digi Gaons’ is to transform rural hamlets into smart villages through the use of ICT applications, besides promotion of a self-sustainable service model for residents.

In some ways, it is a second coming for Aadhaar cards because CSCs had stopped providing Aadhaar-related services after the Unique Identification Authority of India had withdrawn authorisation from them following controversy around data security of the 12-digit unique identifier in 2017. But given the important role that CSCs have played in making a public assessment of government performance, there is the distinct possibility that they will have a larger role to play with more services added on. More power to the CSCs.