Going to a Pragya Kendra might sound more tech-savvy than standing in long queues at the Government offices, but the pace of work does not seem to improve by much between these two options. Sluggish Internet speed and slow servers are forcing applicants to queue outside Pragya Kendras, for long and more than once.
With Jharkhand the first State to adopt the initiative, Pragya Kendras were set up under the Community Service Centre (CSC) scheme to deliver Government to Citizen (G2C) services swiftly. From procuring birth and death certificates to Jail Sakshatkar (Video conferencing sessions between prison inmates and their families), and everything in between, the centres extend online services offered by the Government for the people.
All of this was supposed to reach the applicants and beneficiaries literally at lightning speed with the help of high-speed Internet. But its absence has restrained the Pragya Kendras from delivering with expected swiftness. And the internet service providers are to blame for this, state Pragya Kendra operators.
“There are three Pragya Kendra operators within Ranchi who use broadband services to process applications swiftly, while others use USB modems. For what it costs, the broadband Internet speed meets the expectations at times, but the service is often out of order due to broken cables. Internet connectivity is lost completely lost for three to four days in such cases,” said Pragya Kendra operator Mukesh Singh.
The better alternatives to broadband connections, like opting for third party Internet service providers, are a pricey affair with their charges starting from 15 thousand and going up to `1 lakh.
He said, “The server used by Pragya Kendras is also quite slow. As a result, token generation for entered applications is delayed or the process fails completely and has to be repeated. The related officials do not get the tokens when this happens and thus cannot process the applications. This forces applicants to come back again and again.”
But the State Information Technology and E-governance Department is planning to make this slow Internet speed-breaker go away using optical fibre connection. “With BharatNet, we are moving towards delivering high-speed Internet to panchayats. Process is going on to relocate Pragya Kendras to Panchayat Bhavans, which will make high-speed Internet automatically available to the former as it reaches the latter. letters have been sent to Pragya Kendra owners, asking them to opt for this service,” stated IT Director UP Shah.
The scheme is being executed by IT Department in 17 districts of Jharkhand and the rest seven will be handled by Bharat Broadband Nigam limited (BBNl). This might not be the final solution to this issue, but the Department is already looking into alternatives.
“The reach of optical fibre network is limited and this might lead to some areas in rural pockets of the state being left out from the network. To avoid this is scenario, we have floated 1,200 tenders for providing high-speed internet to areas where laying optical fibre is unfeasible,” Shah said.