The
Government has approved a Common Services Centres (CSCs) Scheme for
providing support for establishing 100,000 Common Services Centers in
600,000 villages of India . The Scheme, as approved by the Government
of India, envisions CSCs as the front-end delivery points for
Government, private and social sector services to rural citizens of
India , in an integrated manner. The objective is to develop a platform
that can enable Government, private and social sector organizations to
align their social and commercial goals for the benefit of the rural
population in the remotest corners of the country through a combination
of IT-based as well as non-IT-based services.
Figure: Honey Comb structure for location of CSC
The
Scheme has been approved at a total cost of Rs 5742 Cr. over 4 years,
of which the Government of India is estimated to contribute Rs 856 Cr.
and the State Governments Rs 793 Cr. The balance resources would be
mobilized from the private sector. The Common Services Centres would be
designed as ICT-enabled Kiosks having a PC along with basic support
equipment like Printer, Scanner, UPS, with Wireless Connectivity as the
backbone and additional equipment for edutainment, telemedicine,
projection systems, etc., as the case may be
The
Scheme is to be implemented through a Public Private Partnership. CSCs
are the primary physical front-end for delivery of Government and
private services to citizens. They are one of the three pillars of the
core and support infrastructure of the National e Governance Plan for
enabling anytime anywhere delivery of government services, the other
two being (a) the State Wide Area Network (for Connectivity) which has
already been approved by the Government for Rs 3334 Cr. and b) the
State Data Centre Scheme (for secure hosting of data and applications)
for which the draft guidelines are under preparation.
Implementation
of a mission-oriented project of this size and scope would pose
significant challenges of project management at the national level as
also in exploiting opportunities to achieve significant economies of
scale in the identification, customization and implementation of the
physical and digital infrastructure required for the project. Further,
many of the potential citizen-centric services would lend themselves to
aggregation at the national level. To serve the above objectives and to
enable the State-specific implementation plans to benefit from such
economies of scale, aggregation of best practices, content providers,
etc. DIT has appointed a National Level Service Agency (NLSA) with
defined Terms of Reference to coordinate the entire activity.
The CSC Scheme has a 3-tier implementation framework:
- At
the first (CSC) level would be the local Village Level Entrepreneur
(VLE- loosely analogous to a franchisee), to service the rural consumer
in a cluster of 5-6 villages.
- At the second/middle level
would be an entity termed the Service Centre Agency (SCA loosely
analogous to a franchiser) to operate, manage and build the VLE network
and business. An SCA would be identified for one or more districts (one
district would cover 100-200 CSCs).
- At the third level would
be the agency designated by the State- the State Designated Agency
(SDA) - to facilitate implementation of the Scheme within the State and
to provide requisite policy, content and other support to the SCAs.