Chhattisgarh has moved more than 450 government services onto its Seva Setu portal, a sharp expansion from the 86 services that citizens could earlier access through the state’s e-District system. The state government says the single platform now lets residents apply online for everyday documents such as income, caste and domicile certificates, along with services from a range of departments.
According to a release issued by the state’s Directorate of Public Relations in Raipur on 27 October, the portal is being run in line with Chief Minister Vishnu Deo Sai’s push to make government services simpler, more transparent and easier for citizens to reach.
From 86 services to 450+
The shift from e-District to Seva Setu is essentially a consolidation exercise. Services that were earlier scattered, or available only in person, have been brought onto one interface where citizens can apply, upload documents and receive certificates without repeated trips to tehsil and department offices.
The government highlighted the case of a Class 12 student from Gorra village in Pusour tehsil of Raigarh district, who received an income certificate through the portal to apply for a scholarship. Income certificates are a routine requirement for scholarships and welfare schemes, and the state says online issuance is easing that step for students and rural families alike.
Districts add department services
District administrations are now layering more services onto the platform. In Mahasamund, Collector Vinay Kumar Langeh has directed that five new services be made available through Seva Setu shortly, according to Dainik Bhaskar. These include:
- Permission for borewell drilling, from the Public Health Engineering (PHE) department
- Refund of earnest money deposits to unsuccessful bidders, from PHE
- Testing of drinking water sources, from PHE
- Online applications for school transfer certificates, from the School Education department
- Information on animal disease outbreaks, from the Veterinary department
Officials and staff of the departments concerned will be given dedicated training to run the new services smoothly, the report said.
Why it matters
Seva Setu follows a pattern seen across Indian states: replacing department-by-department portals with a single citizen-facing window built on shared back-end workflows. For a largely rural state like Chhattisgarh, the value lies less in the headline number of services and more in how reliably those services reach villages, how quickly applications are disposed of, and how well district offices adopt the platform for their own workflows.
The Mahasamund additions point in that direction, bringing utility permissions, contractor refunds and school records, all of which have traditionally needed paper files, into the same digital system as certificates.
Featured photo: Secretariat in Naya Raipur, Pankaj Oudhia / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0