The companies will set up rural kiosks — one CSC for every six villages — which will deliver all necessary services to villagers and access to information on government schemes, agriculture market and other relevant data. Chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh, who attended the ceremony to sign MoUs, described the development as Maharashtra’s big step towards taking IT from a “handful” to the “masses”.
“This is a first major step towards establishing a digital Maharashtra. We will work towards the benefit of the masses,” Mr Deshmukh said. The CSC is part of a national e-governance plan which seeks to take the benefits of information technology to people through user-friendly rural kiosks. These will serve as information and service delivery centres for villagers, irrespective of their educational standard. Across the nation, the government plans to rope in private companies from the IT sector to establish 1 lakh CSCs.
In Maharashtra, around 12,000 CSCs are planned to be set up which will be the largest spread of an IT-enabled delivery system among all the states. On Tuesday, the state entered into an agreement with Spanco Telesystems and Solutions for the Konkan and Pune divisions, 3i for the Nashik division, CMS Computers for Aurangabad and Amravati and Reliance Communications for Nagpur.
A positive outcome for the state government has been that all four private partners have offered to pay revenue to the state, instead of taking subsidy from the government, which is part of the scheme. Of the 11,819 Maha-e-Seva kendras that will be set up through this model, 10,483 will be in rural areas and 1,336 in urban areas.
Each CSC will generate two to three jobs also, thus signalling around 30,000 jobs for villagers who will be employed by companies to operate the centres. CSCs will provide basic e-governance services to villagers like application forms for government schemes and certificates.
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Quelle/Source: The Economic Times, 03.09.2008
