Sanjay, 20, wants his driving licence made but does not know how to go about the entire process. He has been advised by his neighbours to go through a middleman who will get it done but charge a bomb for it. However, in a few weeks Sanjay will not have to shell out thousands of rupees to get his passport made, thanks to the citizen contact centre that would solve his problem.

In an attempt to deliver government-to-citizen (G2C) services more efficiently to the public, the department of information technology (DIT) plans to setup a common or centralised call centre with a single number to address the every day needs of the public. These call centres would provide informational and transactional, non-emergency G2C services for various departments. Based on this need for a common service delivery platform, DIT will establish Citizen Contact Centres (CCC) or a government call centre that would deliver non-emergency G2C services over the phone through a single unique number which will be common across the country.

So, services like finding out the nearest hospital, school, doctor, the process of getting your passport or a birth certificate made and other resources in your neighbourhood will now be just a phone call away.

Explains a DIT official, ?Though there are call centres of many departments and agencies, most of these initiatives are standalone with limited integration with each other and do not have a common platform and interface for the common citizens. Thus, there is a need for a common service delivery platform having a single unique, easy to remember number across the country.?

The phone number ?tentatively to be called ‘IndiaCall’?is on the lines of New York City’s 311 phone number for government information and non-emergency services.

The department plans to roll out the centres in this financial year in two phases. In the first phase, pilots will be done in Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Jammu and Kashmir while the second phase entails the national level roll-out of the scheme in the rest of the country.

DIT is also mulling public private partnership for setting up the CCCs.

“The call will originate in the national call centre but will then be routed to the respective local call centre. So, there would be a central CCC and then CCCs in each state. All these centres would be 400-500 seaters,? the official explained.

As for the local languages, DIT would first launch the services in Hindi and English and then extend it to all the official languages.