Editorial – October 2021

Major allegations of corruption have surfaced in IT governance projects being operated by CSC-SPV in the state of Maharashtra. The main charges pertain to non-payment of dues to service providers running centres for data entry, account keeping, G2G and certain G2C work of the state government at the gram panchayat (GP) level. There are 20,000 such centres which have not been paid for jobs done and this has continued for years now. The monies are purportedly to the tune of Rs 376 crore and have been embezzled by CSC-SPV and its chosen private contractors. Additionally, GPs have also complained about non-provisioning of services by CSC-SPV.

Sequentially, the project details have been reported in this edition’s cover story. In brief, under Project Sangram, coinciding with the 13th Finance Commission (2011-15), a rollout for computerized rural Maharashtra covering 29,000 GPs, 351 panchayat samitis, and 34 zilla parishads was envisaged. It involved about 23,500 computer operators and an equal number of service centres for providing government services. The funds came from the state government and the centre’s ministry of Panchayati Raj. In the five-year period, about Rs 1,000 crore was spent on creating infrastructure and O&M etc.

After the tenure of 13th Finance Commission was over, CSC-SPV came into the picture for providing government services. After several rounds of negotiations, the prices were finalised as also the revenue sharing, the dates by which the state government would pay to CSC-SPV and also the timeframe within which the CSC would make payments to the service centres. There was also provision for the state government to check the flow of payment maintained by CSC-SPV. There was no room for ambiguity on this. Agreements were inked in 2016 between CSC-SPV and concerned government departments to facilitate e-governance activities in GPs in order to make them efficient, accountable and transparent.

Thereafter, CSC-SPV sub-contracted the work to two private vendors and everything turned opaque, money did not go to the service centres. Why have been the service centres not been paid over years. What are the revenue sharing arrangements between CSC-SPV and its chosen private contractors? There was no provision for outsourcing in the agreements, why did CSC-SPV outsource and when it did award, why didn’t it follow an open tendering process? All these questions must be answered through an investigation process as the amounts involved are huge and impact the workers and SMEs in the Digital India space at the grassroot level.