A REPORT ON THE VISIT OF CSCs AND E-DISTRICT AT GOALPARA, ASSAM 19th January 2012

1) A visit was made to the CSCs of Goalpara District, the E-District Facilitation Centre at Goalpara district office and the Circle office at Goalpara accompanied by representatives from the Assam SeMT team and the Srei Sahaj team.

2) The CSCs visited were located in Dudhnoi, Goalpara and Matia, Goalpara

a) The Dudhnoi CSC was located in the Dudhnoi town, located on the Guwahati – Goalpara National Highway which , the CSC was equipped with about 3 laptops. The Srei Sahaj team have made considerable efforts to seed a large number of Financial Services, however the VLE operating the CSC said that his main revenue sources were a) Browsing by customers, b) Photography and c) Railway ticketing. The VLE said that there was delay in processing of applications for e-District services, one of the reasons may be breakdown in the Assam State Wide Area Network link between the District office and the Circle office.

Karnataka Government Releases RFP for CSC program in Karnataka

The e-Governance department of the Government of Karnataka has released the tender for establishment of approximately 5000 CSC's in the state. The tender documents have been uploaded in the  Government of Karnataka e-procurement platform. The last date of submission of tender is 17th August.

Village Telecentre program in Karnataka

Nemmadi program in Karnataka

Authors

1.    Shri Rajeev Chawla IAS Secretary e-Governance Government of Karnataka,

2.    Anirban Mukerji – e-Governance Consultant

Published “A journey through three states Common Service Centres Programme (CSC) Review, NeGP, India” for i4D Magazine August 2007 http://i4donline.net/index.asp

“Nemmadi” in Kannada means peace of mind. The Vision of the Nemmadi project is to empower rural citizens, provide direct access of government services to the citizens and bring government services to the doorstep of the citizen.

1. Introduction

Government of Karnataka (GoK) has been a pioneer in leveraging Information technology in easing the lives of both urban and rural citizens. One of the most path breaking of these e-governance applications is Bhoomi that enables “over the counter” delivery of computerized land records to farmers from the 203 taluka (Tehsil) offices of the State. 

While the Bhoomi program tremendously benefited the farmers there was a demand for establishing of delivery centres for land records at the village level itself. The need for decentralization of Bhoomi catalyzed the development of the “Nemmadi program” program of the Government of Karnataka.

The State Government understood that it could not establish and operate computer centres at every village and hence decided to establish these centres in the villages under a Public Private Partnership model. It was also apparent that these village telecentres would not be viable if only land records were delivered from these centres and for viability, other e-governance services also needed to be delivered through these village telecentres.

3i Infotech pulls out of CSC Program

http://www.financialexpress.com/news/3i-Infotech-pullout-to-hit-e-governance-plan/591696/

Critical Analysis of the Government of India CSC Project

The period 2000 -05 saw a lot of excitement around use of Village Telecentres to bridge the digital divide. However despite a large number of Village telecentres established by a variety of organisations  corporate, CSR led, government promoted, University promoted, NGO led etc.  most of these Village Telecentres were unviable. The DIT under the enlightened leadership of the then Joint Secretary Shri R Chandrashekhar understood some of the drawbacks of the existing efforts and drew up a National program for establishment of 1,00,000 CSC's across the country. The CSC program of DIT provided both Government and Institutional support to the Village Telecentres however this program is also struggling to find its feet as the critical requirement for success of the project, namely a robust platform for e-Governance services to Rural citizens has been difficult to establish.

Interested readers can view the note here

News item on 3i infotech pulling out of the CSC program

Overview of the Government of India Common Service Centre Project

In 2007 I had prepared a note that gives a brief overview of the CSC project and the role for IT product companies in this project. Interested readers can access the document here  CSC Note