The 2nd tech revolution in village India

The government’s ambitious project of setting up 1,00,000 Common Service Centres takes technology to the doorstep of the common citizen

Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr Delhi

The next stage of Information Technology (IT), it seems, will now happen in the countryside, if the Manmohan Singh government’s decision to create a network of 1,00,000 e-kiosks, to be known as Common Services Centre (CSCs), in the rural areas in 2007 is to become a reality. E-kiosk is seen as a nodal point to make e-governance meaningful. It is when villagers can transact official business through the network of e-kiosks that it can be claimed digitalisation of governance has been achieved.

E-kiosk is being seen as an Information and Communication Technology (ICT) unit that includes personal computers (PCs), printers, digital cameras, scanners, projection system and tele-medicine equipment. It certainly looks a lot more ambitious than the PCOs or the private cellular operators who increased telecommunication connectivity by leaps and bounds. It was during the first flush of young Rajiv Gandhi’s call for marching into the 21st century, and Sam Pitroda, who undertook the telecomunication mission, delivered it with a quiet panache. In many ways, e-kiosk can be seen as a more sophisticated expansion and upgradation of the PCO of the 1980s.

The kiosk project is being structured as a three-tier system, with the village-level entrepreneur (VLE), who will manage the kiosk, and who is being seen as a franchisee. The next level is that of the Service Level Agency (SLA), with an apex agency facilitating the service at the state level. To work out the modalities, the Department of Information Technology (DIT) has chosen Infrastructure Lending and Financial Services (IL&FS) as the national level agency (NLA). The mission-mode is the favoured means to implement the scheme. 

A private document of IL&FS looking at the implementation of the CSC project argues for a bottom-up model that “can allow like-minded public and private enterprises—through a collaborative framework—to integrate their goals of profit as well as social objectives, into a sustainable business model for achieving rapid socio-economic change in rural India.” The basic model on offer is a public-private partnership.

It is clear that government alone will not be able to create the 1,00,000 e-kiosk network because lack of funds will remain an obstacle. Private-sector participation will enable the scheme to be a sustainable one by creating an appropriate business model.

An interesting aspect of the IL&FS report is the argument that private sector can be used effectively in the delivery of public service systems. Until now, policy pundits in the government as well as in the private sector had argued that public services should be left to the government, and that private sector should be allowed to grow and expand and generate wealth, which, then, would trickle down to the others.

There is a change of heart in the private sector as the realisation dawns that public service delivery systems need not necessarily mean an all-expenditure scheme, and that there are returns as well. It will be something on the lines of the private health services system, which generates handsome income as people are willing to pay. Of course, the money to be charged has to remain within reasonable limits. The report also argues that the business model for the CSC scheme facilitates creation of employment and generation of incomes, which will have a positive cascading effect on the rural economy, which has remained at the subsistence level for a majority of people living in villages.