Common service centres fall flat

Chennai: The Common Services Centres (CSCs), under the ministry of communications and information technology, were  set up to cater to digital services for over 134 schemes in the country including the Prime Minister housing scheme and free Aadhaar card enrolment. The centres, managed by four district managers in Chennai, remain oblivious to the agents and citizens, as the authorities rarely conduct awareness programmes.

CSC is a centralised mechanism to obtain government services from any part of the country. Unlike the state department services, CSC facilitates people to access multiple records, including land records from other states, EB payment, money transfer and pension details, on a common platform.

Official apathy looms large here as the agents, against the rules, have  set up multiple centres at the same locality. According to CSC rules, an agent would not be given more than one ID and the centres should be in different localities.

In huge malpractice, four CSC Ids are being operated at MGR Nagar of KK Nagar. Though these are operated by four different individuals, they are functional in the same locality.

The agents had provided a differ-ent addresses to the CSC authorities, to obtain the IDs. When the four agents at MGR Nagar were contacted, they admitted to be functioning from the same locality.

Similar cases were witnessed in Ashok Nagar and  Kodambakkam where two IDs are functioning in the same address. When Deccan Chronicle contacted the Chennai district manager of CSC, she said, “We have received a few complaints about agents functioning at the same locality. We will soon inspect the centres and block their Ids.”

Condemning the prevailing malpractices, V. Gopalakrishnan, who has registered a CSC ID at MGR Nagar, asked, “Why did not authorities inspect centres before providing the IDs? The officials have turned a blind eye to such instances.”
“Training programmes are not conducted for agents. We don’t even know the address of the office and they don’t answer our calls,” he added. In a RTI reply, the officials had not provided the complete address of CSC in Chennai.

CSC fails to create a mark

While small states in the country are ensuring regular updates in CSC, the Tamil Nadu government, which merged the procedure with Tamil Nadu Arasu Cable TV Corporation, is too busy looking after state level schemes.

Vinayagam, who is registered with a CSC ID at Virugambakkam, said, “States like Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Chhattisgarh have developed procedures and the number of people using CSC is also high. Day-to-day updation of the schemes can be noticed in those states. Unfortunately, in our state, the awareness is very low.”

How to get a CSC ID?

It is free to register a CSC ID, excluding the Aadhaar services. In the case of Aadhaar card, the agents should deposit a caution payment with the centre.