BHUBANESWAR: If people of tribal-dominated Chaturanjali and 13 other remote villages nearby, many not yet entirely accessible, in Mayurbhanj district are experiencing the convenience of government-to-citizen (G2C) e-services today, Manjulata Chattar has had a significant role in it.
A village-level entrepreneur of Chaturanjali, Chattar runs a common service centre (CSC) in her village that helps people of the area get access to online banking and other government services. In fact, the CSC was termed as one of the top-performing centres in the country by Union IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw who also felicitated Chattar with CSC Digital Seva Gaurav Samman at the CSC Diwas held in New Delhi recently.
Vaishnaw said Chattar digitally trained herself to start the CSC, which has become a lifeline for over 2,000 villagers, especially women, and marginalised communities, in the rural area of Mayurbhanj district. She provides the CSC services to villagers for free.
While the CSC was started by her husband Rajanikant Chattar in 2016, it was converted to CSC+ in 2023. “After my marriage, my husband encouraged me to take advanced training in computer operations. Since he had already received his CSC operator ID, I wanted to help him run the centre. So, I applied for a CSC ID too, and underwent a month-long training on the Digital Seva portal to qualify as an operator,” recalled 38-year-old Chattar, who is a BA graduate from Karanjia Women’s College. While the couple initially handled the CSC operations together, Chattar today runs it entirely by herself and has employed eight staff for help. Of the eight, six are girls of her village who have completed their Plus II or graduation.
At the centre, Chattar and her team help people get their Aadhaar and PAN cards, do online banking, pay bills, register birth and death certificates, file taxes, book train and bus tickets, and avail agriculture insurance besides a host of other government services.
While every panchayat in the district has a CSC, what sets the one run by Chattar apart is the convenience of language. Chattar belongs to the Ho tribe and a majority of the people who come to her CSC also belong to the same community. “People of the area do not understand Odia. While in other CSCs, the conversation mostly happens in Odia, we speak to them in Ho which makes things easier for them. This is why people from not just 13 villages in our GP but from other GPs also come to our CSC for G2C services,” she said.
Chattar has also facilitated opening of bank accounts for over 500 villagers of the area through which they get insurance benefits directly transferred to their accounts under Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana, life insurance and accidental benefits.
But this is not all. She also goes around the villages in her gram panchayat to help women, differently-abled and senior citizens, who find it difficult to come to the centre, to register for G2C services at the convenience of their homes. “We have facilitated more than 2,000 Subhadra Yojana applications from our area. All of them have got their money,” she said.
Chattar along with 10 other women of her village also runs Maa Tarini self-help group (SHG) that is into broiler and mushroom farming.