Status of common service center program in India : issues, challenges and emerging practices for rollout

The Common Service Centre is a 1.2 billion USD initiative by the Government of India. It is an integral pillar of the Government’s National e-governance Plan. The project was started in the year 2004 with the vision to develop these centres as the front-end delivery points for government, private and social sector services to rural citizens of India in an integrated manner. However as on 31st May, 2010, six years after the initiation of the project, only about 50 percent of the States had reported success in achieving 70 percent rollout status of these centres. Even the successful States were being plagued by issues which were hindering the operation and threatening the sustainability of these centres. In this paper we have discussed the current status of implementation of the CSCs across the nation and the pertinent issues that are being faced by the various stakeholders in the project. It was interesting to find out that though the country wise rollout had not yet reached the cent percent mark there were some states that were doing well, compared to others, despite the fact that some of these failing states were the first to initiate the exercise.We have also conducted field studies in the states of Jharkhand,Uttar Pradesh and Meghalaya in order to understand the ground level issues and challenges hampering the implementation of these centres. This paper is an attempt to understand the various challenges and bottlenecks that are being faced in making these common service centres sustainable. Given that the CSCs are designed to provide the last mile linkage to G2C and B2C services, the importance and impact of these centres are immense and the program has the potential to overturn the issues related to accessibility that pulls back the sizeable percentage of the populace. It is however, noteworthy that these perceived benefits to the citizens from this project can only be accrued when these centres are operational. Thus it becomes imperative to study the factors that are hindering the setting up and the functioning of these centres. The study also reveals that there was lack of fool-proof planning at the government’s end in terms of having no structured framework for roll out and no risk mitigation plan in place for a project of this dimension. Moreover, the study shows that there has been a substantial evolution in the business model (based on PPP) that was being used initially across various states in the country to a business model (based on PPP) that is emerging to be more successful and sustainable than what was initially planned for.