CSCs to facilitate free legal advice in rural areas: Prasad

Common Service Centres, which provide government services in rural area, will start facilitating "free" legal consultation to people from June in select states, Law and IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said today.

"Poor people should get legal consultation. For this, we are going to utilise CSC. It will be inaugurated on June 6," Prasad said at a GST workshop for CSCs.

He said that the service will start across 500 village panchayats each in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar and in 800 village panchayats across North Eastern states and Jammu & Kashmir.

"Para legal volunteers will sit at common service centers. There is system of National Legal Service Authority.

It has a scheme for districts which works under Supreme Court of India. Suppose a woman in your village needs legal consultation for free. Someone may be in trouble because of dowry, crime. The para-legal volunteer sitting at CSC will help in getting advise from senior lawyers in district," Prasad said.

He said the government will look into benefits that it can provide to CSCs in return for this service.

The minister said that there are 2.5 lakh CSCs at present covering about 1.75 village panchayats.

CSC e-Governance Services India's CEO Dinesh Tyagi said that the legal aid service will start as pilot project across 1,800 CSCs and will be scaled up based on result of the service.

The government has also decided to train CSCs to help them file goods and services tax for their business and also help merchants around their centre.

"We have started training programme for CSC on GST. CSC e-Governance Services is a GST provider. We will develop platform and provide access to village level entrepreneurs (VLEs) who run CSC. First we will train VLEs to file GST for their business and then ways to file GST for other merchants around them," Tyagi said.

He said that CSC e-Governance Services has target to complete training of all VLEs by June 15 and its platform for GST will be operational from July 1.