eSeva moves closer to masses

From mid-February, citizens can approach eSeva counters to get APS RTC bus passes, railway ticket reservations, life insurance premium payments and Lord Venkateswara's darshan at Tirupati, in addition to the existing facility of paying utility bills.

Announcing this at a press conference today, Praveen Prakash, the director of eSeva, said that they were also planning to offer telemedicine and citizen health card services of Apollo Health in the next three to four days.

"We have also tied up with Deccan Aviation to sell their air travel tickets, which will be announced within a week's time. Talks are also on with Indian Airlines to offer their travel tickets," Prakash said.

"At present, we offer about 40 different services. Our vision is to offer 1,600 private-public services over a period of time," he informed.

So far 13 lakh families have utilised eSeva services, and the service provider is aiming at reaching out to at least one crore families by June-end this year.

There are about 37 eSeva centers with 350 service counters spread over the twin cities and Ranga Reddy district. In addition to this, eSeva counters were recently operationalised in 89 out of the 116 municipalities in the state. Over 1.5 crore transactions worth Rs 5000 crore were transacted so far through the eSeva counters.

"We are facing a minor resistance from the railway department to offer the ticket reservation through our counters. The department's apprehension is that once the blank tickets are kept with us, somebody might misuse them. To address their concern, we have agreed to the suggestion that the citizens who seek the reservation will be issued a receipt initially at the counters. Within 48 hours, tickets will reach their homes from the railways," the eSeva director explained. Similar concerns are being expressed by the cinema theatres, to which we are working out a solution, he added.

While the railway reservation facility is expected to be made available from February 15, the payment of insurance premiums to LIC will be brought into effect by May-end.

"The government-to-citizen services consists of only 40 -50 per cent of our proposed services list. The rest will consist of the business-to-consumer services," Prakash said.

Three more eSeva centers at Alwal, Balanagar and Miapur are expected to be operational by March 31, he announced. We will start focusing on the old city area, which is lagging behind in terms of eSeva counters, he added.

Prakash also informed that the state government's existing call center "� 1100 "� will shortly be provided with an interactive voice-response system (IVRS) that will offer information about the state to the public. The call center will also start accepting complaints related to citizen grievances and corruption from February 15.