IfG.CC - The Potsdam eGovernment Competence Center

These centres will hereafter function as Rajiv Citizens’ Services Centres (RCSC). With this, more citizen service centres are expected to be opened in rural areas, offering the listed services to the rural consumers too who are now getting only a few of them through Rajiv Internet Village centres. A plan has been finalised to open one RCSC for every six villages with Central assistance.

"An exclusive counter to receive various types of applications will be set up at the CFC and the documents applied for can be collected from the same counter after a specified minimum number of days. We will also have a help desk to help people use the application forms," a highly-placed official source told TOI.

DIT has already rolled out 55,000 of the planned 100,000 CSCs across the country.

The CSCs will deliver services under the Bharat Nirman, providing support to other flagship programmes such as National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and National Rural Health Mission, among others.

To make the power of e-governance penetrate further into the country, the Department of Information Technology (DIT) has now planned to set-up additional 150,000 CSCs to cover all Panchayats as well. The CSCs will deliver services under the Bharat Nirman providing support to other flagship programmes such as National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and National Rural Health Mission to name a few.

“The government has sanctioned Rs.10,600 crore (Rs.106 billion) for e-governance projects out of which Rs.5,742 crore (Rs.57.42 billion) will be used for setting up CSCs,” Raja said after inaugurating a CSC here.

SREI Sahaj is a subsidiary of Kolkata-based Srei Infrastructure Finance Ltd and has the mandate of rolling out about 29,000 common service centres (CSCs) across the country.

"Though we have already rolled out 21,000 CSCs, many of them are yet to offer G2C services like issuing birth certificates, land records, etc. Without these services, CSCs can hardly play any role in e-governance as they were supposed to do," SREI Sahaj e-Village Senior Vice-President (Strategic Marketing) Sumanta Pal said.

Chief Minister Narendra Modi declared Banaskantha as an e-gram district at a function held at Palanpur on the eve of the 62nd Independence Day celebrations. After Amreli, Banaskantha has become the second e-gram-vishwa-gram district in Gujarat, with all its 783 village panchayats receiving broadband connectivity.

Also, 392 Community Information Centres (CIC) providing Internet facility to villagers are being made operational here. Amreli was declared an e-gram on May 1 this year.

RMC officials claim that the civic body is the first to introduce such a system for tax payment in the state. "At present, people pay their dues either at different city civic centres or through post offices. However, more often than not citizens have to wait in queues. Also, all these offices have fixed working hours. But, through these kiosks, people can pay their dues at any time," an RMC official said.

While stating this here on Sunday, a spokesman of Haryana Department of Electronics and Information Technology said that new initiatives were being implemented under the leadership of Chief Minister, Bhupinder Singh Hooda to make Haryana number one State in information technology so as to cope with the changing scenario.

Government of Haryana is in the process of setting up around 1200 Common Service Centres (CSCs) across the state by April 2008.

In its quest to set up a delivery platform for B2C and G2C, the government of Haryana is setting up 1159 rural CSCs and 104 urban CSCs.

With a view to giving impetus to e-governance, Himachal Pradesh cabinet today decided to create Common Service Centres (CSC) through 3,366 Lok Mitra Kendras across the hill state.

The CSCs to be established by department of Information Technology would provide facility of registering complaints and grievances through Lok Mitra Kendras under e-Samadhan portal to common man on nominal payment of Rs 4.

This centre, which had been recently sanctioned by the state government with an allocation of Rs 58 lakh, will be established in the Hamirpur DC office and more than 50 services will be provided under one roof.

A CSC essentially is a kiosk in a rural district, which allows online bill payments, booking tickets, applying for jobs, searching for market information and selling of local produce. CSCs are going to be managed by a Village Level Entrepreneur (VLE), which serves as the nodal point for services and government schemes. The CSC rollout is a part of the National E-Governance Plan (NeGP).

The common service centres were opened by the government in Dhubri villages to help people living in the remotest corners find easy access to e-governance, banking, railway and air ticket booking, mobile charging and telephone bill payment.

For a state whose 90 percent population resides in villages, Panchayat was considered the basic unit of establishing these Lok Mitra Kendras, said a government spokesman.