In a mega push for infotainment infrastructure for rural India, the Centre would open 500 cinema halls by the end of March 2023 with each having a seating capacity of around 150 audience.
To be initiated by the Ministry of Information Technology’s digital arm Common Service Centre (CSC), the CSC Rural Cinema will be for the entertainment of villagers in remote areas and has a target of opening about one lakh cinema theatres across the villages of the country, said the sources. The sources also said that the platform will also be used to “propagate” the governance, development and several awareness programmes.
The CSC on Monday announced that it would open 500 cinema halls in rural areas by March 2023 and 1,500 by December 2023 and by the fiscal end of 2024 it would be able to develop 10,000 such CSC Rural Cinema.
In this regard, CSC e-Governance Services India Limited signed an MoU with October Cinemas to take the entertainment through CSC Rural Cinema to rural areas. The MoU was signed between CSC, an SPV under the Ministry of Electronics and IT and October Cinemas aiming to open around one lakh small movie theatres in rural areas during the next couple of years.
“India is the world’s largest entertainment market in terms of movie consumption. Our venture will have features to control piracy of films. We will provide all hardware and software equipment to Village Level Entrepreneurs (VLEs) who run the CSC. An investment of around `15 lakh is needed to run these cinema halls which will have video parlour cinema licence. We have already got over 5,000 expressions of interest,” said CSC Managing Director Sanjay Kumar Rakesh.
Commenting on the new initiative, Rakesh said the concept of cinema halls in villages is still new and the aim is to start small cinema halls with around 100 seats. As per the project CSC cinema halls, will also work as a commercial hub, will make the digital India services more accessible to the people in rural areas.”
“We are launching CSC Rural Cinema for the entertainment of villagers in remote areas. India is the world’s largest entertainment market in terms of movie consumption. Our venture will have features to control piracy of films. We will provide all hardware and software equipment to VLEs who run the CSC. An investment of around Rs 15 lakh is needed to run these cinema halls which will have video parlour cinema licence. We have already got over 5,000 express of interest requests from VLEs. We hope to make around 10,000 cinema halls operational in rural areas by the end of 2024,” said Punit Desai, Managing Director, October Cinemas.