Citizen service delivery in Bangalore is all set to be more pervasive as the Department of e-Governance will be introducing mobile vans in and around Bangalore.
The mobile vans called ‘BangaloreOne on Wheels’ will offer the entire bouquet of services presently being offered at Bangalore One centres. The mobile vans are likely to be introduced in two months.
According to an official of the e-Governance Department, finding a place to open the new centres especially those lying in the outer areas of Bangalore or those coming under the erstwhile City Municipal Councils has been a daunting task.
Normally, the space for all the BangaloreOne centres have to be provided by the BBMP or the BDA, but the outer lying areas hardly have any space owned by the civic agencies that could be handed over. Also, the department does not have the choice to construct new centres, but is only allowed to design and equip the interiors of a given place.
As the demand for these centres is increasing, a decision has been taken to introduce at least four mobile vans, offering nearly 40 types of citizen services that are presently being offered at the 78 centres. Two of these vans are presently being readied with proper interiors and will have four counters each, but the places where the vans will be travelling have not been decided yet.
The cost of readying each of these vans is expected to be around Rs 14 lakh. Director of Electronic Delivery of Citizen Services, Bishwajit Mishra said: “We will see how this works out and then decide on the total number of vans we should introduce. The schedule of the vans is expected to be in such a way that citizens would have prior notice about where the vans will be on a particular day.”
Meanwhile, 14 micro BangaloreOne centres will be set up at branches of Big Bazaar, the retail chain. Kiosks with two counters will be placed at select Big Bazaar stores and five stores in Bangalore are likely to be opened by March. Big Bazaar stores in Mysore, Hubli and Belgaum will also house these kiosks on a pilot basis.
The ambitious project by the department has envisaged opening citizen centres at a distance of two kilometers of each other all over the city. But the problem of not finding office space in the outer lying areas has troubled the department which has been forced to go a little slow on the opening of new centres.