The Hindu Business Line : 60,000 IT-enabled rural centres by Aug 2008 likely

INFO PACK: Mr Ashish Sanyal, Sr. Director, E-Governance programme management unit, Ministry of Communications and IT, flanked by Mr R.V. Rajan, President, RMAAI, and Mr Saurabh Srivastava, Chairman, Nasscom Foundation, at a meeting in the Capital on Wednesday. — Ramesh Sharma

New Delhi June 13 Over 60,000 IT-enabled common services centres (CSCs) are expected to be operational in 11 States by August 2008. These centres would be the front-end delivery points for the Government, private and social sector services to rural citizens in the country.

"We expect about 60,500 CSCs to be set up and become operational by August 2008 in States such as Jharkhand, West Bengal, Haryana, Bihar, Assam, Tripura, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Gujarat and Tamil Nadu," Mr Ashish Sanyal, senior Director, Department of IT, said at a seminar on `Spreading ICT revolution to rural India.' The seminar was organised by Rural Marketing Agencies Association India (RMAAI) and Nasscom Foundation.

The Government had earlier approved a CSC scheme to provide support for establishing 1,00,000 CSCs in 6,00,000 villages in the country. These centres will be designed as ICT-enabled kiosks with a PC along with basic support equipment such as printer, scanner, UPS, with wireless connectivity as the backbone and additional equipment for edutainment, and telemedicine.

These CSC would provide information and services such as e-governance, micro-credit, education and health, amongst others. While the Government services would include certificates, licences and grievance redressal, the private services would cover market price of commodities, education and entertainment offerings.

"We expect all 1,00,000 CSCs, targeted under the scheme, to be operational by December 2008," he said.

sustainability

Mr Sanyal, however, pointed out that the sustainability of the rural kiosks would depend heavily on robustness of the business model, content and services range, as also the ability of village entrepreneur running the kiosks. "For instance, in case of low- income category, customers may seek services pertaining to eligibility certificates for various poverty-related schemes and information on topics such as health," he said.

The scheme based on public-private partnership entails a total cost of Rs 5,742 crore, of which the Government would contribute over Rs 800 crore. Speaking on the occasion, Mr R.V. Rajan, President of RMAAI, said the association plans to come out with a study to benchmark the effectiveness of rural marketing and programmes.

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