Monday, December 20 2004 18:26 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Bangalore: Karnataka's one-stop citizen delivery services kiosk, "Bangalore One" which is modelled on the e-Seva kiosks will begin services from April 2005.

About 15 of the 50 kiosks in the first phase would begin operations in Bangalore from April helping citizens to pay utility bills, taxes, apply for passports among others by a private consortium of CMS Computers Ltd and Ram Informatics.

"We have improvised on the e-seva model and included the ambience," Karnataka e-governance secretary Rajeev Chawla told reporters in Bangalore today (Dec 20, 2004).

e-seva is a citizen delivery service kiosks model which has been a huge success in Andhra Pradesh.

CMS and Ram consortium won the tender on high technical score of 90 per cent and low transaction fee of Rs four for each transaction, he said, competing with seven players including Tata Consulting Services and CMC combine, Wipro, Bharat Electronics Ltd and TCIL.

Initially about 24 Government to citizen services would be provided and all the service providers's back-end technology is up and running, Chawla said.

Under build-own-operate-transfer (BOOT) model, the private firms will run the service for five years employing about 20 people in each kiosk, besides UTI bank paying Rs 4000 as salary for each employee for handling the transactions of the Bangalore One project.

Chawla said the State has invested about Rs four crore in the project, while the private firms will invest Rs 10 crore.

The Government plans to expand the Bangalore One kiosks in other cities of the State in the next few years, he said.