UPSC Articles
CSCs and Passport Services
Part of: Prelims and GS – II – Policies and interventions
Context The Common Services Centres (CSC) has received approvals to manage and operate Passport Seva Kendra kiosks in rural areas.
Key takeaways
- The village-level entrepreneurs (VLEs), who operate the CSCs, will be entrusted with collecting documents, photographs and other details necessary for the passport process as well as the initial non-police verification.
- A nominal fee of up to Rs 100 could be charged for the same.
- The pilot for the programme was launched at a few CSCs in Haryana and Uttar Pradesh.
- Full-fledged services will be rolled out nationwide soon
What is CSC?
- The CSC is a special purpose vehicle of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).
- CSCs are physical facilities for delivering Government of India e-Services to rural and remote locations where availability of computers and Internet was negligible or mostly absent.
- They are multiple-services-single-point models for providing facilities for multiple transactions at a single geographical location.
- Current function of CSCs
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- At present, CSCs are allowed only to fill and upload application forms for others, pay an applicable fee on an applicant’s behalf, and schedule an appointment for them.
- It has over the past three years tied up with partners, both in the public and private sector, across domains by leveraging their presence across the country.
- They have done tie-ups with domestic and multinational corporations as well such as Tata, PepsiCo, Unibic foods, etc.
- During lockdown, VLEs also opened up Grameen e-store for easy delivery of essential and non-essential items in villages, gram panchayats and other rural areas.
News source: IE
