The high-level delegation from 14 African countries on Thursday visited two Common Service Centres (CSCs) in rural parts of Eastern Indian state of West Bengal.

The CSCs in West Bengal are being set up as per a tripartite agreement between the state government, a private firm which is responsible for providing software and hardware for CSCs and village level entrepreneurs who will eventually run the CSCs on the day to day basis. West Bengal plans to set up a total of 6797 CSCs in rural areas and another 700 in urban areas of the state. The state government has mandated that there should be at least one CSC for every 10,000 people and if the population in a local administration area (which is called Gram Panchayat in local parlance) exceeds 10,000, there should be an additional CSC. It is also warranted that if local panchayat office can accommodate, the CSC should be located there.

The delegation’s first visit was to a telecentre in Nasibpur in Hooghly district, which is about 40 kilometres away from the state capital of Kolkata. The centre uses V-Sat for connectivity and offers a large number of G2C and B2C services, apart from imparting e-learning. It also offers offline services such as digital photography, desktop publishing and photocopy. The centre accepts payments towards electricity, telephone and insurance premium. The needy can also use the CSC for buying their train and air tickets.

Ms Usha Mishra Hayes, Vice President of Sustainable Development and Media Business for SREI Sahaj e-Village Limited, the private firm which is rolling out the services together with a village level entrepreneur at each CSC, briefed the delegates about operational details of the centre. According to her, what is important is that the telecentre’s power requirement has been kept to minimum by using laptops rather than desktops as the rural areas suffer unannounced power outages and more often than not need to use generator for functioning.

The next stop for the group was Dasghara, another village in Hooghly district. The Dasghara CSC is located in a local administration office, unlike the Nasibpur CSC which is operating from a private commercial property.

Subsequently, the delegation visited the headquarters of state-owned electric utility WBSEDC in Kolkata to understand how the service provider which uses the CSCs to receive payment towards electricity bills. The WBSEDC officials said it has signed an agreement with SREI Sahaj e-Village. Under the agreement, it ahs authorised the CSCs to accept the bill payment on its behalf. Anybody who pays the electricity bill at the CSC will receive a receipt which carries the logo and stamp of the utility company. The utility company officials said they pay about 1.7 per cent of its revenue collected online are given back to the CSCs, which is shared equally between SREI and local entrepreneur.

SREI Sahaj e-Village CEO Sabahat Azim and West Bengal IT Secretary Siddarth gave a detailed account on how the CSC rollout is taking place in the state. SREI Sahaj e-Village is also setting up CSCs in five other states, apart from West Bengal.

The African delegation on study visit of India on Thursday wrapped up the second leg of the tour – to the southern Indian state of Karnataka – by visiting a citizen centric e-governance project in rural Karnataka.The visit to a telecentre in a village located 45 kilometres from state capital city of Bangalore helped the delegates appreciate different kind of activities undertaken by the rural e-governance project, called Nemmadi (Nemmadi in local Kannada language means “peace of mind”. There are currently 769 Nemmadi telecentres in Karnataka. "The main idea behind the project is to bring the administration closer to the common man and have a single window for all government services at the village level,” said Jayateerth Gururaj, state coordinator for CSCs.

The telecentres offer as many as 40 services, the most important one being the digitised land records. Besides, a villager does not have to travel the faraway district headquarters for getting various certificates issued normally by the district administration.

“A citizen who had to spend a whole day and a minimum of Indian Rupees 150 to get services by way of bus fares and money given to officials to get the certificates, will have to pay just Rs. 15 as service fee at the telecentre, Mr Gururaj said. The services include registration of life and death, income certificate, marriage certificate, residence certificate, etc. The telecentres have also recently started railway reservation and accepting payment towards electricity and telephone.

The delegation in the evening left for Kolkata. Next two days, the delegates will visit rural telecentres in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal.

The African delegation, which is on a study tour of India, spent its third day on Wednesday by studying e-governance activities in southern Indian province of Karnataka. During the day, the delegates visited an integrated citizen service centre in the provincial capital city of Bengaluru.

Bengaluru, which is popularly known as the IT capital of India, is credited with running the best urban e-governance project in the country. Known as BangaloreOne, these citizen centres serve as a single window for interacting with a host of government departments. Citizens can pay their bills, taxes, receive documents such as birth certificates and even apply for a passport at any time of their convenience as these centres, 55 of them located in different parts of the city, work round the clock on all days, including Sundays and public holidays.

The BangaloreOne centres are run on a public-private partnership model. While the government has made available space for setting up the centres, the private partner sets up the centres and manages the day-to-day running. The funds collected through transactions – each centre with 10 to 12 terminals does nearly 1,000 to 1,500 transactions a day—are deposited in a pool account to which the government has access. The operator is paid every month according to the number of transactions carried out in the previous month. The BangaloreOne officials briefed the visiting delegation about the functioning of the centres and also told them that they are constantly adding new services to the bouquet available to the public.

Later in the day, the delegates participated in a high-level meeting with provincial government officials who manage various aspects of e-governance. The meeting, chaired by senior bureaucrat M N VidyaShankar, who heads the e-governance initiatives of the government, helped the delegates get a detailed account of measures undertaken by the province to put in place an e-service structure. Karnataka is the only province the country that has been using e-procurement route for inviting and executing tenders.

A study tour by a high-level African delegation to India commenced on Monday 30 November in Kozhikode in the southern Indian province of Kerala. The team comprising ICT professionals from 15 countries was briefed by Kerala State Information Technology Mission (KSITM) Director Mr. Rathan U Kelkar about tremendous progress made by the province in reaching the benefits of ICT technologies to people through a concerted effort. Currently, Kerala, which is one of the smaller provinces in India, has more than 2,200 Common Service Centres (CSCs) and these centres, set up through public-private partnerships offer a variety of services in wide spectrum of areas such as agriculture, e-governance, education, and e-payment. He said the provincial state government plans to increase the total number of centres to 3,150.

Mr Koda Traore, Programme Coordinator ICT4D of CTA which has sponsored the study tour, said African countries can learn immensely from India’s experience in utilising ICT technologies for  community development and empowerment. He hoped that the delegates will be able to get first-hand exposure to the ways how these CSCs are operating in India during the 10-day visit and adopt some of these practices as per their requirement back home. Apart from Kerala, the team will visit two other Indian provinces – Karnataka and West Bengal.

Arun Varma, vice-president, Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services Limited, who has organised the study tour, said ICT technologies are very important for accelerating economic and social
development of developing nations. Countries which use ICT technologies effectively can leapfrog and attain economic development and social empowerment in a shorter timeframe than that took developed countries to prosper in the past.

Later in the day, the delegation visited a CSC in the neighbouring district of Malappuram, which was the first district in the province to initiate an e-literacy programme about eight years ago.

The delegates also met with the district administrator of Malappuram and wrapped up the day with a visit to a regional data centre, which caters to five districts in the province.