The purpose of setting up CSCs was to provide Government to Consumer (G2C) services such as payments and fine settlements and Business to Consumer (B2C) services such as provision of goods and services.
A working paper on the 'Status of Common Service Centre Program in India: Issues, Challenges and Emerging Practices for Rollout' has been brought out by the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIMA).
Professors Rajnish Dass and Atashi Bhattacherjee, in their paper, suggest that six years after the project was initiated, only 50% of the states had reported success in achieving 70% rollout of the CSC, despite being given 1.2 billion US$ by the GoI.
The working paper suggests that even in the states where the CSCs are successfully implemented - common G2C and B2C services have not reached the citizens. Bhattacherjee observed that VLEs had started side businesses like photocopying or selling gutkha. The reason was the non-functioning of the centres because of lack of connectivity.
Poor internet connectivity, low literacy rate, insufficient training of village level entrepreneurs (VLEs) who provide the services to rural consumers, withdrawal of service centre agency (SCA) from the project, low computer literacy among people who run the centre - all these factors have hindered the operation's growth.
"Of the one lakh centres proposed by the ministry of IT, GoI, as on June 2009, the number of pending centres stood at 60,000 which came down to 45,686 centres in June 2010," the researchers said.
They also revealed that Jharkhand was the first state to claim completion of CSC. Though Jharkhand had been successful in implementing 99% of its centres, only 21% among these centres had got any connectivity and the rest were made operational in offline mode. None of the 325 CSCs rolled out in Rajasthan till June 2009 had connectivity and Uttarakhand shared a similar fate.
Talking about Gujarat the researchers say, "With the state government's intervention, not only has the CSC rollout been 100%, but it has exceeded the number of planned CSCs. The government had clubbed the CSC scheme with their e-Gram initiative."
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Niyati Rana
Quelle/Source: Daily News & Analysis, 18.07.2011
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