SREI Sahaj To Create Chain Of IT Service Centres In Rural India

SREI Sahaj e-Village, a subsidiary of SREI Infrastructure Finance, has embarked on the largest rural IT Infrastructure project in the country with an estimated investment of Rs1000 crore. SREI Sahaj conceptualised this initiative almost a year ago, however, it has taken a concrete shape only now.

The project entails setting up 25,000 Common Service Centres (CSCs) in rural India across six states, namely West Bengal, Bihar, Orissa, Assam, Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. These Centres would link these rural areas with the entire world and provide all necessary services needed by them. Beginning from e-governance to e-commerce and e-learning, it has all been incorporated in the bouquet of services to be offered and the plan is to gradually expand the service range.

Hemant Kanoria, chairman and managing director of SREI informed that ’the implementation has already begun in West Bengal, Bihar and Tamil Nadu and by the end of next year all the 25,000 centres would be operational'.

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Under a unique model created by the company, people would be empowered at the operating level. About 25,000 entrepreneurs would run these centres and they in turn would create direct employment for 75,000 more people in the rural areas. The VLE or the Village Level Entrepreneur will operate the CSCs, offering a variety of services, including programmes, and facilities that the government would provide in the rural areas like birth certificates and land records among others. SREI Sahaj would add the e-commerce and e-learning products to makes the Centre remunerative for the village level entrepreneur.

“SREI has always believed in creating partnerships and through this initiative we will create 25,000 new rural partners within a span of two years across six states in India”, said Kanoria.

“This venture of creating rural infrastructure is exciting and will service about 21 crore rural people, i.e. about 33 percent of the rural population of our country,” added Kanoria. The government’s plan is to set up 1,00,000 CSCs for offering such services. SREI’s share through its operations in the six states has already touched 25 percent, which would make it the single largest service provider in the rural areas.

“Our plan is to expand to other states and cover a large part of the country through our rural partnership approach. It is a mammoth task, but in our one year of trial, we are convinced that we can achieve our target,” said Dr Sabahat Azim, CEO, SREI Sahaj e-Village.

The Sahaj-developed e-learning model offers unique courses in English language and Computer learning through a broadcast device over the Internet.