Delays and pullouts plague DIT's flagship CSC project

The Department of Information Technology (DIT)’s flagship programme of common service centres (CSC) that aims to introduce e-governance on a massive scale in the country, has constantly been missing its rollout deadlines thanks to delays and lack of interest from the private sector.

So huge have been the delays that one lakh CSCs were to be rolled out by March 2008 but till now, only 81,025 of them have been rolled out across the country and the target date for all the CSCs to go live is September 2010.

The CSC project in an integrated mission mode project (MMP) of the government that intends to provide high quality and cost-effective video, voice and data content and services in the areas of e-governance, education, health, telemedicine, entertainment, among others.
 

No. of CSCs
State	Total	Rollout
Maharashtra	10,484	5,368
Andhra Pradesh	5,052	2,055
J&K	1,109	500
Uttar Pradesh	17,909	7,049
Karnataka	5,713	800

“Delays are there and many times the tendering goes into a second round. There are some areas where there are special issues and problems in the bid process. Sometimes, there are no bidders and the process goes into two or three rounds,” R Chandrashekhar, secretary DIT, told Business Standard.

The DIT plans to have 2,50,000 CSCs by 2012 to cover all Panchayats to enable people to access the services under e-governance in their vicinity.

However, some information technology firms have pulled out of the CSC scheme on account of such delays.

“We have exited the CSC business. We bid for 12,500 centres for both business to business and business to consumer activities but of those, only 6,500 centres were setup. There were delays and data was not being covered. Moreover, we were not getting any visibility on the revenue front,” said Amar Chintopanth, CFO, 3i Infotech.

The CSCs are designed as ICT-enabled kiosks having a PC along with basic support equipment like printer, scanner, UPS, with wireless connectivity as the backbone and additional equipment for edutainment, telemedicine and projection systems.

The company had an operating expenditure on the CSC kiosks per annum and had already invested Rs 260 crore in them before pulling out.

Chandrashekhar, however explained that the CSC project has been subject to mid-term evaluation on concerns of power, connectivity and availability of government services and only four per cent of the CSCs have closed because of financial viability concerns.

“We have also made recommendations for a legislation for appropriate roll out of services in a phased manner,” he added.

Till June 2010, most states have not had complete rollout of the scheme barring a few like Haryana, Gujarat, Puducherry, Delhi, Jharkhand and Sikkim along with Goa and Chandigarh that have completed the 100 per cent roll out.

Big states like Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh have only seen half the roll out while in UP, it is less than half at 7,049 compared with the projected 17,909. Similar is the story with Karnataka where only 800 CSCs have been rolled out as against the targetted 5,713.

The total outlay for all the MMPs including the capital expenditure and lifelong operating expenditure is between Rs 30-40,000 crore and of this, Rs 10,000 crore has already been spent. All projects are to go live and start delivering services by 2014.