The government-run citizen facilitation centres (CFC), where people are supposed to get easy access to caste certificate,domicile certificate and other affidavits easily,have failed to deliver due to surging crowd at the 14 CFCs one for each taluka in the district. It doesnt help when people are required to come again and again as the required documents are not made available due to a number of reasons staff crunch,system failure or insufficient availability of data. The state government has roped in four private players Reliance Communications,Spanco Limited,3i Infotech and CMS Computers Ltd between whom different regions of the state have been divided for this Government-to-Consumer (G-2-C) initiative. Coming the way of Pune in a months time,with a basket of value-added services such as birth and death certificates,7/12 extracts and about 46 other documents will be Spanco,that has been selected for western Maharashtra and Konkan regions. Pune district alone will have 527 such centres in addition to the 14 CFCs,thus ensuring better coverage for the citizens. Of this,467 will be in rural areas and 60 in urban areas of the city and will go under a new name Common Service Centres (CSCs). A government of India initiative under the national e-governance plan of the Department of Information Technology (DIT),the services for Pune will be rolled by Spanco under the public-private partnership model in a months time. Vice-president of Spanco Ltd Ravi Bhatnagar said the centres will be called Maha e-seva Kendras. In all 3,689 such centres will come up in the Pune and Konkan revenue divisions,he said. The effort is expected to bring benefits to over 1.8 crore people living in 12,600 villages by opening CSCs across 100 talukas of these two divisions. We plan to open 527 centres in Pune,471 in Satara,212 in Sangli,333 in Solapur,344 in Kolhapur,213 in Sindhudurg,416 in Ratnagiri,528 in Raigad and 497 in Thane. Nearly 150 of these centres will also be coming up in Mumbai and adjoining suburbs, he said. Resident Deputy Collector Anil Pawar under whose supervision the CFC is operated at the district collectorate said additional services are welcome. Since the services will be spread out in all the villages,the district administration will cooperate to ensure that citizens benefit from the G-2-C initiative,he said. We will be holding a meeting soon and working out the process for data transfer to these centres, he said.
