Get services at your doorstep from April

Get services at your doorstep from April
The Times of India

Bangalore: In less than a month, when most of Bangalore’s citizen-centric services will go the e-way and onestop, it will hardly be pathbreaking. But Karnataka is probably the only state where rural digital services have preceded the urban.

On April 2, 15 Bangalore One centres will be opened in the city, catering to a wide variety of services like bill payment across utilities, birth and death certificates, passports, railway reservations, requests for building sanctions, etc.

“It will gradually change the way services are delivered. Most importantly, it will remove the government’s role since these centres will be manned and maintained by the private sector,’’ e-governance secretary Rajeev Chawla told participants at a recent UNDP workshop on development and right to information.

“This will be one more step in the thinking that government should be a facilitator, not retailer of services. We expect it be efficient as well, since the operator will be penalised if the service is not delivered within six minutes at non-peak time,’’ he stated.

Bangalore One comes on the heels of Karnataka most well-known digital exercise — Bhoomi, computerisation of land records. An estimated 200 lakh farm land records are now available in digitised form and the government is currently setting up a wider area network to access documents all over the state.

“Also, Bhoomi is being further decentralised. From the existing kiosks at taluks, about 4,000 hoblis are in the process of getting kiosks. This will save farmers time and transportation money,’’ Chawla stated.