Common Service Centers – Rural Internet Kiosks in India

Early in March this year, we had filed an RTI with the Department of Information Technology for information on Common Services Center in the country. Common Service Centers or CSCs are an eGovernance initiative by the Indian Government “with the vision to develop these centres as a front-end delivery points for Government, private and social sector services to rural citizens of India in an integrated manner.”

The government intends to spend over Rs. 5742 Crs. over a 4 year period. We wanted to see how efficiently this program was executed. This press release says that, “The CSC Scheme is not just about rolling out IT infrastructure but to build a network of 100,000+ rural businesses across India”

The below visualization should provide you an objective view of the implementation of the program in each state.

Key Highlights

• As of March 2011, Haryana has no CSCs. They last had 1159 CSCs in the state in July 2010
• Gujrat tops the table with maximum deployment of CSCs – 274126. It is followed by UP (163307) and then by Madhya Pradesh (122161)
• We see a trend of slow deployment in North East. All 7 states show dismal number of planned and deployed CSCs with the worst numbers seen in Arunachal Pradesh and Mizoram. We feel that the deployment of CSCs is a function directly proportional to the population in a given state
• Jharkhand has shown a consistent implementation of 100% deployment in all years
• Maharastra started slow with 0% deployment rate in 2008, 23% in 2009, 53% in 2010 and already at 78% deployment in 2011
• Interesting to note that J&K has also achieved its target of CSCs deployment with zero shutdowns

While these numbers are encouraging, it will be interesting to analyze these numbers against the recently concluded National Census population numbers to guage the penetration of such initiatives in the rural areas. We shall be visualizing this trend in our future posts. In the meantime do tell us what you think of the visualization.