A new company CSC e-governance Services India Ltd will be floated by the government to provide back-end services to the huge network of 1,00,000 common service centres (CSCs) across the country that have sprung up to take IT to rural India. The company is a special purpose vehicle (SPV) being set up by the department of information technology. It will be a first of sorts for the government in the IT sector where it has largely avoided entering except for specialised bodies. Senior officials of the department of information technology said the proposed company would be listed and it will harness the best of private sector enterprise to provide cheap and large-scale services to India?s population which has still not benefited from the IT boom.
Headquartered in New Delhi, the company will have a 44.5% stake from the state governments, 44.5% stake from all the service centre agents? essentially companies that have bid for CSCs with the rest 11% stake on offer for institutional investors ? both domestic and foreign.
?We have been talking to the service centre agents and there is a consensus about the 44.5% that would lie with them,? said Shankar Aggarwal, joint secretary of the department. He added that the company is expected to start functioning within a month.
This will introduce the economies of scale in the working of the CSCs which have been bid out to companies like Reliance Communications and 3i Infotech. At present these companies enter into agreements with each service provider to offer services like banking, mobile services and e-learning at the CSCs. But the scale of the projects is often too small to make them viable for the companies to bid for. FE had earlier reported that some firms like Reliance Communications are shutting down their CSCs in West Bengal, as a result.
So, the new company will take on the services on offer from the private and government companies and distribute them like a large back-end operation of a national retailer to the country-wide network of CSCs that are coming up.
The target is to set up 2,50,000 such centers spanning all villages with a panchayat level body, within the next three years. ?This entity will take care of the interest of both the players who run the CSCs and the government bodies. Moreover, it will bring a certain amount of uniformity to the table,? said Agarwal. He added that it was proving difficult to get even basic information from CSCs operating in a particular area because of the multiplicity of the players involved. ?With a central agency in place, the process will become easy,? he said. Agarwal said roping in foreign investors will bring discipline in the financial operations and therefore develop credibility for the company. He added that in case the operators of the CSCs fail to pick up the 44.5% stake offered to them in the proposed company, that will be offered first to the state governments and then to the FIIs.
According to latest figures with the department, about 40% of the total 1,00,000 CSCs have been rolled out in the country. So far, only three states?Haryana, Sikkim and Jharkhand have completed 100% roll-out of the project. The department now expects all CSCs to be operational by mid-2010. The government plans to link the centres to act as the interface centre for various national level programmes like the National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme and the National Rural Health Mission among others.
