Designing a sustainable business model for e-governance embedded rural telecentres (EGERT) in India

An effective inclusive growth model for rural areas in India will have to be driven by information and communication technology (ICT), and telecentres (places where shared access to ICT and enabled services are available) are the potential instruments of rural information and empowerment. Realising this, the Government of India has under its National e-Governance Plan, committed to the setting up of 250,000 common service centres in rural India. However, the experience with the roll out of this plan has not been encouraging as many of the centres are closing down due to the weak business model.The first part of this article, the academic perspective, suggests an alternative model for rural telecentres, the e-governance embedded rural telecentres (EGERT), in which e-governance is an important service to be provided, and details the contentious issues clustered round the role of the government; the viability of partnership models with the private and NGO sectors; the institutional design for rural telecentres; the services to be rendered by the centres and the likely markets for them; the location of the centres and support in the form of infrastructure and manpower; and the technology to support the institutional design. Stakeholder representatives from the government, the industry, the NGO sector and the academia discuss these issues in the second part of the article, and make suggestions towards a viable model for service.