A group of officers with vested interests defeat the very purpose of the e-district project, which turned into a model for e-governance across the country, said entrepreneurs of ‘Akshaya’ centres through which the project is being carried out.
“The main objective of the project was to enable the citizens to access essential certificates such as community and income certificates online.
“Some officers are still giving them manually, defeating the very purpose of the project.
“Therefore the number of online applications for these certificates have come down,” an entrepreneur in Kollam said, on condition of anonymity.
A group of entrepreneurs also put the blame on the officers by saying that the officers tried to present the rush at the Akshaya Centres, at the beginning of the e-district project, as the inability of the centres to deliver the service. This blame had adversely affected the functioning of the centres.
“For transferring the amount to an account for delivering a service, Akshaya Centres have to pay Rs 11.20 as service charge to the government which makes the functioning of the centres not economically viable.
“There was credit facility when the e-district project was launched. But this also stopped,” All-Kerala Akshaya Entrepreneurs Confederation general secretary R Nandakumar said.
The maximum amount charged by an Akshaya centre for delivering a service is Rs 30.
But the entrepreneurs themselves agree that a few among them charge more which damages the image of the centres.
“We received complaints about a few village officers and directed the complaints to the Revenue Department for sorting it out,” V Somasundaran, who is holding additional charge of IT Mission and e-governance, said.
e-district, launched in 2008, is a State Mission Mode Project under the national e-governance plan.
The project proposes integrated, seamless and online delivery of citizen services at the district-level through automation of work flow, back-end digitisation, integration and process redesign.
The project aims to target aggregate services delivered at the district-level and to undertake back-end computerisation for enabling the delivery of citizen services through Akshaya centres.