Circa 2014. 37-year old Sonu Bala was dejected not able to clear an exam for a regular job in the college where she was an ad hoc lecturer. “I wanted a stable income flow, which I was not having,” Sonu says.
She had a Master’s in Computer Application and Education, M.Phil in Computer Applications and M.Ed and started her career as a Computer Science lecturer in Ahir College, Rewari, Haryana, earning ₹15,000 a month.
Though Sonu was better off than many others from Haryana’s interiors, she wanted financial stability. She says: “My husband (an English teacher in a government school) and I felt the need to have financial stability. The fear of not being regularised loomed large.”
The urge to have financial stability, while continuing in her chosen field led Sonu to her current job — Village Level Entrepreneur (VLE). “I applied to the government’s advertisement for Common Service Centre (CSC) schemes under the Digital India Programme,” she says.
Luck favoured Sonu in 2015-16 and today she earns about ₹1 lakh a month. More importantly, she also empowers boys and girls in areas of her expertise and employs them. She runs a successful CSC at Guruwara, Rewari district, Haryana.
A CSC is an IT-enabled front-end delivery point of essential public utility services, social welfare schemes, healthcare, financial, education and agriculture services, apart from a host of B2C services to citizens in the rural and remote areas of the country. Each CSC is run by a VLE. The selection of VLE is done by the Service Centre Agencies (SCAs). Their earnings are completely performance-linked – how much can they deliver.
“When I started offas a VLE, the number of people choosing it was limited and there was an exam which I had to clear,” Sonu says.
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