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States Status Check
Under the CSC scheme, each state has its own deadline. Even while the rollout is going on, there are some states which have done better than the others. Not all states are at par. In fact, senior officials point out that in all probability, maximum number of states that will be covered in terms of complete rollout would just be around 20, whereas all others will be at various stages of implementation as on March 09.

MK Yadava, MD, AMTRON, Assams nodal IT agency, says, We have signed the agreement with our private partner SREI and Zoom Developers in March 2008, and the work has already started. All formalities have been completed and the teams are ready, other preparations are also on. So we are hoping to meet the deadline of March next year. He promptly adds, Since it is not typically a hardware project, the scale is massive, involving not only monetary cost but also investments in building and selecting the right people to drive the project. A delay of 5-6 months here or there should not be considered such a big deal. We have a total target of 4,375 CSCs, and I believe we would be able to deliver 90% in terms of numbers by the deadline.

Assam will have just about 15 operational CSCs by July this year. How much would that help the state in meeting the deadline though has to be seen.

Orissa is another state which is likely to miss the deadline. Pradeep Rout, principal consultant, program management unit, OCAC, Orissas nodal IT agency, points out that the state has some peculiar issues, like its tribal population, network connectivity, a serious power crisis, and the naxal problem, which cannot be ignored. We have selected Zoom, SREI and CMS as our operators, for six zones. We are hoping that in another six months 50% of the CSCs will be operational with some services. And the rest would be done in six more months.

The state has a January 09 deadline for the complete rollout of the CSCs.

Its a Chicken and egg problem: what comes first, the CSC or the services Chandrashekhar is the man driving the Indian dream of achieving an e-governed nation. In a candid interview with Dataquest, Chandrashekhar explains the governments thinking and strategy to take the CSC scheme to its successful rollout. Excerpts

R Chandrashekhar, additional secretary, Ministry of IT & Communications With just close to nine months left to the deadline for a complete CSC rollout, how is the implementation coming along? The main task as you know is to set up 100,000 CSCs all over the country, one for every six villages. The model of implementation is to do it through public-private partnership and to select service center agencies (SCA) responsible for a territory. Roughly speaking, it is one CSC in a district or a group of districts. So the process of selecting SCAs is handled through state guidelines under the Government of India scheme. So this process is going on and most of the states have advanced quite far on that. As of now SCA selection has been completed for over 90,000 CSCs, and in over 60,000 CSCs the actual physical implementation has also begun. So, the services are available in these CSCs? No, see, one has to understand the way the scheme has been conceptualized and visualized. The CSCs would be set up by the SCAs, and they would typically select a local entrepreneur, and then through some mechanism, the CSC would be set up. Initially when the CSC is set up, it would provide some of the most elementary kind of services like training for the use of computers and even word processing, but very quickly this would start getting wrapped up. For example, the moment the connectivity linkage is there then other information services, information available on the Web or full-blown information from government departments will start becoming available; also citizens would be able to avail of various other private services. That schedule will be decided by the states and will vary a bit from state to state depending on their level of readiness. There is a little bit of a chicken and egg problem in terms of the government services, what will come firstthe CSCs or the services. The CSC scheme has tried to break that chicken and egg problem by ensuring that the CSCs come up first and a certain amount of government support is provided for them. Its a buffer then for that period till a full maturity of government services is achieved. Is there a mechanism that the Center has devised, to check that these services are at all being made available on the ground? It is far too early for us to be talking of regulatory oversight on the CSCs, in terms of service availability. At this stage, in fact, there is no state in which the CSCs are more than two to three months old. Haryana and Jharkhand are the two states where a large number of CSCs have come up because the process was started at an earlier stage. Some have come up in West Bengal, and some are coming up in Himachal. So the schedule is there, the states will have to work it out. There is a framework which has been provided by the Government of India under two broad categories. One is the type of services, which can be made available through the CSCs, and the other is the e-district project for which currently only pilots have been implemented. Once those pilots are completed, which typically will take about 12-18 months, rollouts across the state can be done fastersubsequently providing volume of government services. Thirdly, for a lot of these services to be made available electronically, connecting all the government offices becomes critical because you cannot provide an electronic service to the CSC where the actual action has to be taken by an office, which is not connected. So the completion of the SWAN and the completion of the horizontal connectivity of those offices also has to be mandatory. All of these are, in themselves, an enormous task. So a lot of micromanagement is required by the states, which would actually happen over a period of a year or two. Now how quickly it can happen is anybodys guess. Maybe in six months a reasonable amount of information services can be made available. For instance, all the digital information that is available in the government access can be drawn for those. Which can be done in literally one month. Especially once the data center is up, hosting all of these at one point will become possible.

Jharkhand, on the other hand, is one of the few states, which has achieved 100% CSC implementation. Principal secretary, IT, RS Sharma says that now the state is at a stage where it is verifying and certifying all the 4,562 CSCs that have been rolled out. However, Sharma too raises issues with connectivity. Our private partners are trying to solve the issue by getting into tie-ups with telecom operators on a standalone basis.

The issue is not only with these two states there are other trouble-makers as well. The list is long. The delay is inevitable, reasons out Chandrashekhar: This happens in a country of Indias size. One cannot expect all the states to work at the same pace and we are aware of that, so even when the decision was taken to implement it through the states, we were aware that it may slow down things a little because some states may not react as quickly as others.

However, clarifies Chandrashekhar, One should not see it as a drawback because the involvement and leadership of the states is paramount in ensuring the success of this project. Even if theoretically one could have implemented it centrally by not involving the states, in a much shorter time, but it would have been disastrous in terms of the success of the program.

Aruna Sundararajan, CEO, Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services too makes an attempt to explain the delay: What takes time is the initial mobilization. Once the infrastructure has been created at the grass root level, things just flow. We are seeing momentum now, so may be there is a little bit of spillover but it is largely on track, may be about 10-15% below. IL&FS is the nodal body designated as the project management agency. Sundararajan works closely with the department of IT to develop the project and facilitate its implementation in tandem with state governments.

Sundararajan claims that all the mainline states are on track. All the big states, except Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh have finished the process, these two will also start immediately. In two-three months they are expected to finish the process, according to Sundararajan. Pain states include some of the smaller states and others like the northeastern states and Jammu & Kashmir.

In some of the smaller states the action has not been initiated because either the number is too small, like in the case of Daman and Diu, Chandigarh, and Lakshadweep, where its only four CSCs. Or NCT of Delhi, which entirely is an urban area. In Delhi things are being managed under the MCD and NDMC. In the case of Andaman and Nicobar, though in terms of number of CSCs they are entitled to ninety-one, but the island terrain has made the state opt for a different approach and not the CSC scheme. Some of the bigger states, including Karnataka, due to elections. (which recently got over) had delayed the decision of implementing the scheme.

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