The formulation of the National e-Governance Plan (NEGP) envisages the leveraging of these advances for the benefit of the citizens, especially those in rural and remote areas. As a part of the NEGP, the Government has already approved a scheme for the establishment of State Wide Area Networks (SWANs) at a total outlay of Rs. 3,334 crore over a period of 5 years. These SWANs will extend data connectivity of 2 Mega bits per second upto the block level in State or Union Territory in the country. The block level nodes, in turn, will have a provision to extend connectivity further to the village level using contemporary wireless technology. Under the scheme, proposals from 17 States/Uts have already been sanctioned and first installment of grant released to them.
The Department of Information Technology has formulated a Scheme to build an enabling environment for establishment of 110,000+ Common Services Centres, primarily in the rural areas by the year 2007. The CSCs would provide a whole range of government and private services in the form of e-Government Services, Education, Entertainment, Telemedicine, Information Exchange, Market Linkages, Vocational Training, Micro-credit, etc.
Three-tier Structure
The CSC Scheme would be rolled out to establish 110,000 CSCs across the country, with an equitable geographical spread that would cover at least 40 per cent of the Gram Panchayat locations in each district in a State. The Scheme would be implemented through a three-tier structure for the States. At the first (CSC) level would be the local Village Level Entrepreneur (VLE – loosely analogous to a franchisee). At the second/middle level would be an entity termed the Service Centre Agency (SCA – lossely analogous to a franchiser). At the third level would be the agency designated by the State to facilitate implementation of the Scheme within the State. In addition, it is proposed that out of the total 110,000 CSCs, around 10,000 CSCs would be set up in urban areas of India, with an aim to providing financial incentive as well as cushion to the SCAs.
Since implementation of a mission-oriented project of this size and scope would pose significant challenges of project management at the national level as also in exploiting opportunities to achieve significant economies of scale, a National Level Service Agency (NLSA) has been appointed to assist the Department of IT and the States in carrying all activities related to pre-implementation and implementation phase of the Scheme. The NLSA would work with the Department of IT to develop a Public Private Partnership frame work for the Scheme, coalesce diverse stakeholders to work through common institutional and contractual frameworks, harness national level resources, loop best practices, enable transparent and inclusive process of participation across stakeholders, undertake to underwrite resources for the Scheme, standardize design, content and processes into a replicable collaborative framework and so on.
It is envisaged that State governments would play a major role in facilitating the establishment of a large number of CSCs, particularly in the rural areas. State governments would put in place an appropriate institutional mechanism for such support. State governments would also focus on taking necessary legal and policy measures to enable the CSCs to come into being, attain sustainability and deliver the e-government services as contemplated in the CSC Framework.
Bottom-up Model
The CSC Scheme would be a bottom-up model for delivery of content, services, information and knowledge, 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. But beyond a delivery channel, Department of IT envisions the CSC to play a role of effective ‘change agency’ that would provide a structured platform for socially inclusive community participation for collective developmental activities. Such change, it is proposed, would be undertaken through 3 important components: (i) A Public Private Partnership (PPP) Framework (ii) Rural Entrepreneurship and Market Mechanisms (iii) Government policy and support.
The aim of the Scheme is not merely to roll out IT infrastructure but to build a network of 100,000+ rural businesses. To that effect, the business and financial structuring of the CSC Scheme has been designed to create value proposition for all stakeholders and alignment of their economic interests.
The total project cost for the Scheme is estimated at Rs. 5750 crore for a project cycle time of four years. A major element of the CSC Scheme would be the role of Government in terms of financial support for the Scheme. The Department of IT has proposed a revenue support based on delivery of e-Government Services (first 4 years) as against a Capital Subsidy support. The entire one-time cost of setting up the infrastructure for 110,000 Common Services Centres would be met through cost sharing between SCA and VLE and market borrowings. The NLSA would undertake to underwrite the funds which need to be leased through market borrowings. Further, no Government support is envisaged to be provided for the CSCs to be established in urban areas. The objective of the cost and risk sharing in the structure of the Scheme is to ensure that high levels of commitment are created among the CSC stakeholders to operate the business successfully. Disbursement of government support would be shared 50:50 between the Centre and the State. To that effect, the Government is not front-ending its funds through capital subsidy but back-ending it through revenue support. Thus the risk mitigation of Government funds is built into the financial structure of the CSC Scheme.
Employment for Rural Youth
The CSC Scheme as structured would create innovative mechanisms for social development in India. The CSC Scheme, by virtue of its design and application, would create a transparent platform for direct delivery of e-Government services that would aim to reduce bureaucratic delays, administrative red tapism as well as burden of deployment of government manpower. On the other hand it is estimated that the CSC Scheme would generate direct and indirect employment opportunities for over 400,000 rural youth across rural and urban India. In addition, as a part of its capacity building and training process, the CSC Scheme would train over 250,000 rural youth in social entrepreneurship, business management as well as IT skills, making them employable, even outside the sphere of the CSC Scheme.
The CSC Scheme can also be effectively used to efficiently leverage the huge Government resources in a focused and systematic way which can save cost effort manpower and time for the Government very effectively. In addition, the CSC Network would be an efficient distribution pipe through which the Government can distribute its various Schemes and offer its services directly to the rural consumer, in a cost-effective manner. By reaching the remote rural locations of India on a sustainable basis, and offering a variety of world-class services, the CSCs would encourage social inclusion of hitherto marginalized communities and under-privileged sections of the rural society. In short, the CSC Scheme would be an ideal platform for fundamental transformation of the ways in which development challenges would be met in rural India.
Indian Language Technology
India is a multilingual country, with 22 official languages & 10 scripts. In India only 5 per cent people know English rest 95 per cent are deprived of benefits of information technology development. The benefits of information technology can reach to the common man only when software tools and human machine interface systems are available in people’s own languages. To enable wide proliferation of ICT in Indian languages, tools, products and resources should be freely available to the general public.
The Department has taken a major initiative to launch fonts and software tools for various Indian languages, for free use, to the general public in phased manner. The software tools such as Fonts, Key-Board Drivers, Text Editors, Spell Checkers, Morph Analyzers, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Dictionaries and Messaging Systems for Tamil, Hindi and Telugu have been launched in public domain for free use by the masses on April 2005, June 2005 and October 2005, respectively. Releases of similar tools for Punjabi, Urdu, Marathi, Oriya, Bangla and other Indian languages are expected to be covered in the next one year. All these software tools are also available for free download at the Indian Language Data Centre website (www.ildc.gov.in) and TDIL programme Website (www.tdil.mit.gov.in).
Quelle: PIB, 17.02.2006
