Budget 2019: Nirmala Sitharaman proposes special fund to extend digital delivery of services through CSCs

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s maiden Budget speech on Friday proposed creating a special Universal Service Obligation Fund in order to bridge the rural-urban digital divide and extend the reach of service delivery systems such as the Common Service Centre (CSCs) across India under the Digital India programme. “To bridge rural-urban digital divide, BharatNet is targeting internet connectivity in local bodies in every panchayat in the country. This will be speeded up with assistance from Universal Service Obligation Fund and under a Public Private Partnership arrangement,” she said without dishing out further details of the mentioned fund. [caption id=“attachment_6943761” align=“alignnone” width=“825”] Registration for govt schemes taking place at a CSC in Meerut, Uttar Pradesh. Image courtesy: Facebook@cscscheme[/caption] Significantly, digitisation of the service delivery system has been a major focus of the Narendra Modi government with the Digital India programme becoming the carrier for most of the schemes floated by the Centre and the states. Several of the government schemes such as application for a house under the Pradhan Mantri Gramin Awas Yojana (PMGAY) and old age pension provided by the state government, have been made available to the public in both rural and urban areas through CSCs spread across the nation. In her Budget speech, Sitharaman proposed to further improve and extend the reach of the service delivery scheme. CSCs are small public-private partnership ventures, under Digital India where a village level entrepreneur facilitates government services at a nominal fee to the villagers. “The basic intention of the scheme is to shape CSCs as rural enterprises enabled through the internet communication and technology framework. We are encouraging rural entrepreneurship and using it for providing government services,” says Dinesh Tyagi, CEO, CSC e-Governance Services, the special purpose vehicle (SPV) floated to implement the scheme under Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. A CSC is normally started by a village level entrepreneur with due permission from CSC e-Governance Services at his own cost with basic facility of internet and a stall. The entrepreneur is given access to the online service system after which he can effectively provide both government and private services at a fee. Misba Hashmi, a village level entrepreneur who has been operating a CSC for the last five years at the remote village of Buria in Haryana, explained how the system functions. “The villagers have to visit the CSC with the requisite documents to avail the government services. The documents are scanned and their application for service is digitally processed and forwarded to the concerned department or ministry immediately. This is done for a payment of a facilitation fee which is normally in the range of Rs 20 to Rs 30.” After the application is approved, the applicant is provided with the applied service. Hashmi is one among the nearly four lakh village-level CSC entrepreneurs who are working as single window operators for the citizens to avail government services. “There are more than 350 services provided by the state and Central governments and also the private sector. The people of the village can avail them at a CSC,” says Hashmi while she scans the Aadhaar card of a beneficiary. The secret to speedy delivery of government services to a great extent lies in the CSCs which by-pass red tape and digitally processes applications. “If a person wants to avail a home under the PMGAY, then in normal course, he or she has to visit the concerned office. The procedure for application, file movement and processing of application takes enough time. But an application forwarded through a CSC does not take that much time as it is processed digitally,” she says. Hashmi said that in the last five years she has processed nearly 2,000 application for homes under the scheme and most of them are built by now. Sitharaman in her Budget speech today announced that in the last five years 1.54 crore houses have been built and 1.95 crores are proposed. Hashmi’s CSC also forwards applications for cooking gas cylinders, toilets and electricity connections to the concerned authorities. Tyagi said that one motto of rolling out the scheme was weeding out corruption from the government system. “There is hardly any scope of a meeting between the government official and the beneficiary in the CSC system and hence there is hardly any scope for bribery,” he said. Somesh Singh (name changed) a resident of Dhanauri Kalan, a remote village at Gautam Buddh Nagar district says that the CSC scheme has achieved both the targets in his village. “Apart from the convenience of getting services in our village itself, the CSC has also ensured that we no longer need to pay bribes to government officials,” he said. Dhanauri Kalan is developed as a digital village which not only homes a bustling CSC, but also is connected with Wi-Fi. As per an Oxfam study, India is one of the most unequal countries in the world with regards to distribution of national wealth among the citizens. What is equally worrying is the fact that distribution of information across regions is also equally disparate, and as a result citizens fail to avail benefit of government services. Dhanauri Kalan, a Hindu-dominated village in Uttar Pradesh and Buria a Muslim-populated village were certainly among those areas that have now set new standards for the government to meet in last mile connectivity and inclusive distribution of facilities. “Villagers now can avail all services within minutes without going to government offices. Even women, who were earlier not aware of the availability of welfare schemes, now avail them via the CSC,” says Hashmi. Here CSC now registers a turnover of Rs 60 to Rs 70 lakhs yearly. The idea of CSC was first floated in the year 2004 and the scheme was rolled out in the year 2008. By the beginning of the year 2014, there were 82,000 CSCs across various states in India. But Jitender Solanki, the owner of the CSC in Dhanauri Kalan told Firstpost that the business of CSCs picked up only after 2014. “In the year 2014, the services provided by CSCs were drastically increased by the government and village-level entrepreneurs began making profit,” says Solanki. He earns Rs 45,000 a month after paying salary of 15 employees and other dues. He says that after Narendra Modi was elevated as the Prime Minister of India, both businesses and profits earned by CSCs have seen a steep rise. The Finance minister’s speech indicates the intent of the Government of India lies in further empowering the existing infrastructure of digital service delivery. Click Here For Latest Updates on Budget 2019 Watch LIVE Coverage of Budget 2019 Calculate Your Income Tax for AY 2019-20