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Technology is recognized as an important vehicle for growth the world over. Achieving the widespread use of Information Technology (IT) for the benefit of people is the major challenge faced by the policymakers. As a step towards meeting the above challenge, progress is seen in every State with respect to the efforts made by the governments, commercial entities, non-profit and grant-making bodies to expand Internet connectivity.
Therefore, all those who are supporting the IT power as a medium uniquely suited to building open societies, are studying as to what can be done to make IT services widely available and affordable. Working on the decentralization of administration, the Government of Karnataka has launched the Rural Digital Services (RDS) Project, under which a novel IT service named `Nemmadi' (implying relief, in Kannada language) is inaugurated for rural citizens. The Karnataka Government's 800-kiosk `Nemmadi Telecenter' Project was initiated in September 2006 to bridge the digital divide in rural Karnataka.
The basic idea of the project is to help the rural citizens avoid traveling longer distances to avail services provided by the government for their routine requirements like procurement of caste and income certificates, old age pension, educational scholarships, and so on. The Nemmadi project has been initiated in the State of Karnataka to bring administration closer to the common man. The following are the objectives of the project.All the village telecenters run on PPP model with minimal investment from the side of the government and yet have the overall functioning control to regulate the quality of services and authentication of information. A common private partner is selected through an open and transparent competitive bidding process, to combine the customer-friendly attitude of private sector backed by the reliability of the government sector, both of which are necessary to be integrated to deliver the services to the satisfaction of the citizens. |
