Common service centres in India through pilot initiative

Abstract

There is an increasing focus of government to use information and communication technologies for social, political and economic development in rural areas. Common Service Centres (CSCs) are an initiative in this direction. CSCs serve the function of "Rural Kiosks" with basic facilities like computers with internet connection, printers etc. so that more and more facilities can be provided in villages itself in a more transparent manner. Karnataka government introduced Nemmadi Centres on a PPP model at Hobli to deliver revenue department related forty two services and other services has now launched a pilot project to have these services at the Gram Panchayat level. A pilot project, of CSCs (named as PRAGATI), had been designed and launched in four Gram Panchayats of Gubbi taluk, Tumkur District in December 2010 and presently has been extended to fifteen Gram Panchayats. Our focus through this contemporary concern study initially was to develop a framework to assess the quality of services being delivered. In that direction, we developed a questionnaire based on the ServQual framework. Following this, we visited four centres and five schools to observe the quality of services being delivered. The initial idea of measuring quality from customers' perspective didn't work out well because the villagers didn't have any benchmark to compare these services with and since these services were at their door steps, they were anyway happy. So we suggested that since the services are not fully developed currently and also the project is in a nascent stage, a model based on customer feedback may not work presently. Instead, to assess the quality, we shall use the model where we measure the gap between service quality specification and quality of actual service being delivered. We then tried to identify some parameters which are most important from the services quality perspective and can be used for this purpose. Our next objective was to come up with some new service ideas which can be implemented in a cost effective manner. For this, initially we prepared a list of all the potential services, later on we did a depth and focused group interview of around sixteen villagers. After the interview, we did a cost benefit analysis to finally come up with services which are really required by the villagers and can be a source of revenue for the centre. Design of these services can be taken up as an extension to our work for fruitful outcomes