Govt to increase number of e-Seva centres in villages to 250,000

Centres will help village-level entrepreneurs to interact with national experts; double up as e-service distribution points

Ravi Shankar Prasad, Communication and Information Technology Minister, said the government was planning to increase number of common service centres in the country while speaking at Make In India Mumbai edition.

Currently, there are 150,000 such centres in the country.

“We want to increase centres to cover 250,000 gram panchayats soon,” said Radha Chouhan, CEO, e-governance, IT.

These centres, she said, will enable “village-level entrepreneur to talk to national-level experts” for guidance, apart from being an e-services distribution point. Chouhan, who followed Prasad at IT and electronics seminar, said the government was also focusing on partnering with private cloud companies to take services online. 

Prasad affirmed that there was a clamour among state governments to have “electronic clusters”. These cloud services will, potentially offer, among others digital lockers. 

“Let's assume you have applied for a passport and your date of birth needs to be verified. You will not have to go through a verification process. You can just give them access to your certificate and the work is done,” said Chouhan. 

She also confirmed that e-signature using Aadhaar without a dongle was being used to verify most documents.

“The process of making it a reality has started. There have been 50 signatures already. We have tied up with NIC and a bank and once they go through it will rise monumentally. We are the first in the country to offer these services,” said Rajat Moona, director general, C-DAC. He added that C-DAC was working with the digital locker companies to be able to get e-signs for private certificates and documents as well.

The call for transparency and good governance was a subject discussed by several speakers. 

Chouhan said that the government had used their e-procurement system for 1.18 million tenders worth over 17.2 lakh crore until January 2016. She said that there will be more tenders going through the system as cloud services improve. 

Prasad said that the $350 billion industry, which includes IT, ITES and e-commerce, will get a boost by the government planning to boost BPOs in rural India.

“In Maharashtra alone, there are 100 35-seat call centres, said Prasad. Currently, in the country there are 48,300 seats. Regionalisation of government websites was brought into focus once more. “We have come up with a cloud-based tool that translates language on the fly,” said Moona.

Chouhan also said that the government was finally waking up to data analytics and would seek private partnerships imminently.