The point of decision of a government service and the point of its delivery have since time immemorial been one and the same, usually inside a government office. One of the fundamental reasons why governments are criticized is the absence of, or the very poor quality of, the front-end, or the point of contact of a citizen with the government. It’s here that, more often than not, there are instances of red tape and corruption.
What has been happening over the last five years is nothing short of a revolution, which has been quietly spearheaded and rolled out by Rentala Chandrasekhar, India’s information technology (IT) secretary, regarded by many as perhaps one of the most brilliant civil servants ever to have been in the Indian Administrative Service (IAS). He has, through a unique public-private partnership (PPP) model, which he conceptualized and designed, succeeded in separating the point of decision of a government service from delivery.
The model has conceptualized 250,000 common service centres (CSCs) through a PPP arrangement, which are being set up at the rate of one per panchayat. Some 55,000 of these are currently operational and the rest will be up by 2012, making it one of the flagship projects to have been successfully implemented by the government.
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These CSCs have been bid out on the basis of a franchiser-franchisee model. Various agencies bid for it state-wise and the state decides the packaging of districts as many units or as just a few. Most have taken the revenue division as the unit for the bid; for example, Andhra Pradesh has divided its 23 districts into six zones.
There are a number of private services such as IT education, matchmaking, agricultural pricing information and developmental services currently available through CSCs across the country. The government services currently available include services related to land records, caste certificate issuance and utility bill payments. Some interesting services on offer include those by the Aravind Eye Hospital where its doctors conduct the initial check-up remotely and only then those needing further treatment are sent to the hospital. This has helped expand Aravind’s eye-care services to remote villages, reduced the burden at the hospital, and expenses for the people who want to use them. Likewise, the Swaminathan Foundation offers different types of agricultural counselling. Crops are brought to the centres, diseases identified, and cures suggested, all remotely via CSCs.
When it comes to different states, with respect to government services, there is a lag, and the original build-out period for such services was envisaged over a period of two-three years. The cost (all inclusive) of running such a centre comes to about Rs10,000 per month including capital costs. The VGF (viability gap funding) on the average has been one-third of the cost, which is being provided by the government. The real challenge for CSCs is the slow roll-out of government services. Aggressive bidding for these projects has led to under-bidding and the only way to fill the gap would be to roll out government services faster since the VGF itself cannot be changed after a bid has been formally awarded to a private party. Thus the government is now trying to accelerate the same by dovetailing schemes such as the National Rural Health Mission through CSC.
Connectivity is also a challenge at the moment. There are four major means of connectivity, namely, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd, or BSNL, connectivity (dial-up telephony) or VSAT (very small aperture terminal)-based systems or BSNL dedicated copper line, or WiMax. The last of these is being rolled out over the next few months as BSNL completes its WiMax testing and roll-out.
Under the leadership of Chandrasekhar, Aruna Sunderarajan and Dinesh Tyagi (a serving and a former IAS officer, respectively) have been coordinating with the 25 states to get the project implementation going on the ground and on the service buildup, the terms and conditions of the MoU of service delivery with government departments, and deserve significant credit for the roll-out of the CSC programme across the country.
Efforts are on to put in place a service delivery gateway, which would be a single gateway to deliver multiple government services. It would give out a service request number, which can be tracked by the department, or by the requester of the service, and works like a PNR number in the railway system.
Interestingly, the roll-out of CSC has happened fastest in Jharkhand and that too inside some of the Naxalite-affected areas where even the private sector has not been willing to go into (but some entrepreneurial NGOs went in undeterred), and in states such as West Bengal, Gujarat, Haryana and Kerala.
IMRG, Marg and nine other such agencies have done an independent survey of land records digitization, availability, experience of the citizens with using an e-government service and measurable improvement in service delivery. The main outcome has been that it has reduced the number of trips and the time taken to get the service for the citizen. Independent assessment of CSCs operational for more than six months is currently on, along similar lines.
Content, connectivity, trained operators and infrastructure are the four pillars of CSC, of which two (namely, the last two) are already in place in 55,000 locations, and in about 80% of CSCs, some form of connectivity is available that needs further enhancement.
The country owes a debt of gratitude to Chandrasekhar and his team for putting in place the building blocks of a system which would change the way we think about government service delivery, forever.
Srivatsa Krishna is a Harvard MBA and an Indian Administrative Service officer. He writes weekly on business, government, infrastructure and entrepreneurship. The views expressed here are his own.
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