The Department of Information Technology’s (DIT) ambitious e-district project will be rolled out soon. The project’s implementation will be in two phases with the districts where at least 70% of the common service centres are operational slated to be covered in the first phase.
What is being aimed at through the project is electronic delivery of a clutch of high volume citizen centric services, at district and sub-district level, which are not part of any other Mission Mode Projects (MMPs) of the department,
Under the programme, the districts will offer five mandatory services of issuing certificates, social welfare, revenue court, ration cards and RTI services including grievance redressal.
While the isssue of certificates will offer services like domicile, nationality, caste, marriage, income, employment, birth, death and non cream layer, the social welfare services include pension disbursements. Similarly, the revenue court services would include issuing notices, case listing, case adjournment and stay orders.
The other mandatory services are categorised as ration card services of issuing new cards and modification of old cards. The RTI services offered would focus on application, tracking, monitoring, redressal and appeals related to various departments.
These services are web enabled and will be accessible to the citizens through the CSCs which are ICT-enabled service delivery outlets providing a range of services to the people in the village or the town in which it is located. They are the front-end delivery points for government, private and social sector services to rural citizens in an integrated manner. The MMP would be implemented over a timeframe of four years which would also include two years of operations and maintenance (O&M) support.
“By 2015, we plan to have the e-district project up and running. However, the issues of power back up needs to be addressed besides expediting the rollout of CSCs for providing access to the citizens,? said a DIT official.
Incidentally, the CSC scheme has not picked up as expected with deadlines and the quality of services not being met. Of the intended 1.26 lakh CSCs to be established across the country, the actual rollout has only been 94,786 or only 75%.
Besides these mandatory services, states also need to choose five more categories of services not being covered under any other MMP and may include marriage services, license, utility services, collection of taxes and dues and employment services, among others.
The e-District project was approved last month by the Cabinet Committee on Infrastructure to be implemented at a cost of Rs 1663.08 crore in all 640 districts -including the 41 districts where pilot projects have already been initiated- for a period of four years.