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ShareNew Delhi: The government and its private sector partners have completed putting up 60,000 out of the one lakh common service centres, even as some centres have been closed down due to operational difficulties, government officials said. The government will also have another round of bidding for another 150,000 CSCs that have to be operational by 2012, taking the total to one CSC per 2.5 villages.
The centres, part of an ambitious plan to make government services easily accessible to the common man through Internet-enabled kiosks, work on a public-private-partnership (PPP) model under which operators have to generate most of their revenues from user charges. Shankar Aggarwal, joint secretary with the Department of IT, Government of India, said 15 states already have their SWANs up and running the remaining will come onstream by September.
The government will also allocate nearly Rs 2,500 crore in the upcoming budget to convert local government records into digital format for being fed into its the new Internet-like backbones being set up in each state (SWAN). It will also recruit a squad of 300 to 400 IT engineers from institutions like the IITs "at market salaries" to enable state governments to manage the new networks.
The CSCs are the customer-facing end of an ambitious programme to overhaul how most of government services are delivered to the citizens. More than two years ago, 100,000 CSCs were awarded to the 16 winners of a selection process in which participants had to bid the lowest amount of government subsidy they wanted to run the centres.
Along with it, two other massive programmes -- one for digitising the government records and another for setting up a 'private Internet' for each state government -- were also set in motion. Once the digitization and 'backbones' are ready, the CSCs will offer 27 type of government services, including issue of passports, land records, paying taxes, agricultural schemes and information.
Aggarwal said some regions, such as Bareilly in UP, have already digitized their records and citizens are able to obtain documentations and certificates from the government through their CSCs.
The digital records and the SWANs or state-wide networks which connect the records with each block headquarters require a dedicated engineer corps to bring in project management skills, Aggarwal said.
"By September 2011, the entire National e-Governance Project [involving both the back-end and the CSCs] should be up and running," he said, attending at conference organized by the Manufacturers' Association for Information Technology.
Meanwhile, a small number of CSCs have been shut down due to a variety of reasons, including the non-availability of G2C or government to consumer services. Another official in the Department pointed out that some CSC operators have found the viability of the operations ques ionable, after bidding extremely low level of government support.
"Can you believe it? Some of them bid zero funds from the government in the hilly tracts of Uttaranchal. If they can't run them, they will have to be offered for bidding again," the official, who was not directly connected with the CSC program, said.
