In what can be seen as a major boost towards effectively bridging the digital divide, the Consortium of Comat, 3i Infotech and N-Logue has been awarded the rural telecenters project by the government of Karnataka. Minister of State for Revenue Sri Jagadish Shettar announced it at a press conference in Bangalore.

In a presentation, the Secretary General for E-Governance, Sri Rajiv Chawla said, “The unique Public Private Partnership model will be a win-win-win situation for Government, Public and Private as well.”

CEO of Comat, Sri Ravi Rangan said, “Services that can be made available in the Kiosks are unlimited but we need to start by offering the most relevant ones like Land Records, Bill payments, Food coupons and Electoral cards. Over time the telecenters can become the activity hub of the surrounding villages.”

The vision of the project is to empower rural citizens, provide direct access of government services to them and bring government services to the doorstep of the citizen thereby bridging the digital divide in Karnataka.

A key “Government to Citizen” (G2C) initiative, the services will be available to citizens through 800 Tele Centres at the hobli level and 176 Rural Digital Services (RDS) back offices at the taluk level. The Tele Centres will serve as the citizen interface for individuals to make requests to the government through an online system. Each of the Tele Centres will be fully equipped with state-of-the-art desktop computer systems and peripherals networked with the RDS back offices”

Services delivered through the project will include around 30 Government processes including copies of land records, approval of Old Age Pension to senior citizens, issue of caste certificates, issue of Income Certificates etc. 

In addition to this, the Education Department also proposes to use the village Tele Centres for delivery of computer aided education under the Central Government’s Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan program to primary and higher primary school children. Similarly the Agricultural Department will look to utilize these Tele Centres for delivery of information related to agriculture, prices of agricultural commodities, availability of agricultural inputs like seeds, fertilizers and pesticides. 

Comat Technologies will have the responsibility of setting up and running the kiosks and N-Logue comes in as the infrastructure and network solutions provider.

The opening of the service is scheduled on October 1st onsite at Ramanagaram on the outskirts of Bangalore by the Chief Minister Sri Kumaraswamy.

Comat as one of the pioneer E-Governance organizations in the country has been successfully running a pilot project for Rural Business Centres called “Namma Service” for a couple of years now.

The new project promises to eliminate most existing bottlenecks in Government to Consumer services in the rural sector and bring about transparency eliminating corruption and middlemen.