An integrated approach to rural digital services-case study on common service centres in hundred thousand villages of India

Efficient, effective and un-hindered, symmetric access to Governmental information is a fundamental goal of India's National E-governance Project (NeGP). The plans for this project recognize that citizens’ Information needs are for both generic and specific purposes. Post-deployment research on earlier experiments with rural telecentres has shown that successful deployment of ICT platforms for development needs both dynamic updates to local data and knowledge that can aid decision-making process for personal and economic well-being of rural citizens. While access to relevant information may be key to rural development, mere availability of information is not enough. Information is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for citizen-empowerment. This paper studies the over-arching needs of architecting the front end delivery system of Government to Citizen (G2C) services through an one-stop ‘Common Service Centers’ (CSC) in Indian villages through a case study in the action research mode. An analysis utilizing AHP (Saaty, 1998) rank orders and prioritises the critical to quality and critical success factors for this integrated approach.