With nine sampark centres in the urban sectors offering services from depositing electricity, water bills, to getting birth and death certificates, payment of taxes and even getting a doctor’s appointment, the Department of Information Technology, UT has seven more such centres in the villages. In rural set up, these are called gram sampark centres where exclusive services like tubewell bookings.

“From eleven services of seven departments initially, the project has now graduated to provide 20 services through three delivery channels apart from increasing the number of counters from 3 centres (12 counters) to 9 centres (36 counters). It can also be replicated because of the robust nature of technology involved and wide array of services that it can provide,” says IT Director Manjit Brar.

While e-Sampark centres offer facilities and transactions (in sectors) and gram samparak centres offers the same in villages, UT also has jan sampark centres which only provide information and internet services to residents free of cost. While one jan sampark centre is in Sector 20, PGI too is getting another such centre.

Brar says the Chandigarh model is an improvisation of the IT enabled similar models in Singapore, Andhra Pradesh (E-save) and Bangalore. “Civil Society, India, an NGO has listed the sampark project as among the best practices e-governance practices of the administration.”

Statistics: Where have numbers reached

Statistics reveal that since the launch of the project in September 2004, Rs 959 crore has been collected as revenue in the centres in 42 lakh transactions. With more facilities added and more opening of the centres, the number of transactions per month has reached a whooping 1.46 lakh. In the last ten months alone, Rs 341 crore of revenue has been collected (from April 2007 to January 2008). Compared to the previous year, Rs 300 crore revenue was collected for the same period in 2006-07. “The revenue has been increasing at 25 per cent at year at these centres,” say officials.

Sampark centres: What's New

While the focus last years was to take the sampark centres to the villages (rural Chandigarh saw 7 gram centres opening last year), the focus this year, officials say, would be more on adding facilities both in rural and urban centres. Some of the new additions in the centres will soon include: 

* Depositing BSNL landline and mobile bills: The in-principle agreement has been reached at between the BNSL and the administration and the facility of depositing bills at the sampark centres would start soon. The bills of other telecom providers including Airtel, Connect and spice are already accepted at the centres.

* Depositing school fee has already been proposed and is likely to be implemented this academic session.

* Six more gram sampark centres are going to be operational in villages in UT within two weeks, taking the total number of gram centres to 13. Four more such centres would open in different villages, making it one-village-one sampark centre.

*  Sector 27 and Sector 34 would get their own e-sampark centres in the coming few weeks.

* As many as 28 new jan sampark centres are being opened in the city in various sectors. These would be built and run on BoT basis, which the operator getting the advertisement rights for the next four years.

Facilities offered under one roof

* Issuing Senior Citizen Card, Disability Identity Card, disbursement of pension for aged, widows and differently-abled.

* Payment of electricity Bill, water and sewerage bills, booking of open spaces and community halls

* Doctor’s appointment for patients to GMSH & GMCH

* Tenant registration, domestic servants registration, general, sticker and postal challan

* All deposits for dwelling units of CHB

* Passport Application Submission