Government plans to establish One Lakh Common Service Centres (CSCs) in 600,000 villages,to provide IT enabled services to the people in the rural areas.Out of which 18,000 CSCs have already been set up.The CSC roll out is part of Department of Information technology's steps to support Infrastructure under the National E-Governance Plan for enabling anytime, anywhere delivery of government services. Department of Information Technology would provide calibrated support through policy interventions and appropriate financial support to create the basic infrastructure for these 100,000 proposed CSCs. All these CSCs are scheduled to be operational by July next year.Agencies for setting up of service Centres have been selected in most of the cases.
In Jharkhand and Haryana, the roll out of the Centres is already complete while in Gujarat it will be completed soon. In other states like West Bengal, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Assam, Orissa, Meghalaya and Tripura, a number of CSCs have already operational.Agreements have already been signed with the selected Service Centre Agencies (SCAs) for setting up of about 76,000 CSCs in several states. A maximum of 17,909 CSCs are proposed in Uttar Pradesh followed by 9,232 in Madhya Pradesh and 8558 in Orissa; 8,463 CSCs are to come up in Bihar and 6,626 in Rajasthan.
This Common Services Centre is an ICT-enabled Service Delivery outlet providing a range of services to the people in the village / town in which it is located. These Centres are being 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. Approved by Government these Common Service Centre Scheme are being envisioned as the front-end delivery points for Government, private and social sector services to rural citizens in an integrated manner. The core objective being to provide 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.
Being implemented through a Public Private Partnership model, it has been approved at a total cost of Rs 5742 Cr. over 4 years, Out 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.
Through these network of access points, the Department of Information Technology of the Government of India is attempting to leverage the advances in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for the benefit of the citizens, especially those in rural and remote areas.
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