Common Service Centres lead government drive to deliver goods in rural areas

By

Isabelle Crossley

Published
Apr 29, 2020

The government is promoting a rural essential goods delivery network, which has onboarded around 2,000 Common Service Centres and plans to increase the availability of and safe access to essentials for rural citizens. 

 
“These are like Amazon and Flipkart, but for the rural folk,” the CSC’s CEO, Dinesh Tyagi, told the Times of India about the new delivery network of village stores. “

We started with the initiative about three weeks ago and have already onboarded about 2,000 CSC centres.” 

The village-level online retail chain is expanding swiftly with CSCs which are rural digital outreach government organisations. The CSCs collectively reach over six crore people through a network of close to 3.8 lakh outlets. 
 
Rural citizens can now order essential goods online and have them delivered through retail outlets set up by private individuals. The initiative is designed to reduce the need for those living in rural areas to travel significant distance to buy essentials and to make social isolation easier for them. 
 
The village stores take both offline and online orders and aim to deliver goods the same day. A dedicated app has also been created and provided to village-level entrepreneurs to allow them to manage orders and to allow customers to place orders.