A CAG audit of Common Service Centres found that 88% of them don't actually offer Aadhaar services, 86% of rural operators earn less than ₹500 a month, and the agency running the network collected ₹109 crore in mandatory training fees from these very operators — diverting ₹7 crore of it away from training.
MeitY's Common Service Centres are pitched as the local backbone of Digital India: a village-level entrepreneur (VLE) opens a small office, and rural India accesses Aadhaar, e-District, banking, and PMFBY through them. CAG Report No. 5 of 2026 went and physically checked 231 of them. Aadhaar services were unavailable at 88.31%. e-District at 63.64%. PMFBY at 48.48%. Banking at 47.19%. A separate verification of 315 centres found 81 outright shuttered. Between 2018 and 2023, 35-47% of the network was inactive at any given time. The VLEs themselves aren't doing better: 86% of rural operators earn less than ₹500 a month, against a setup cost of ₹50,000 — a payback period north of eight years, assuming the centre stays open that long, which the audit suggests it usually doesn't. Meanwhile CSC-SPV, the agency running the show, collected ₹108.89 crore in mandatory certification course fees from these same operators between 2020 and 2023, diverted ₹7.26 crore of the ₹21.40 crore allocated for actual training, and women-run CSCs ended up 54.64% inactive. Digital India is working — just for the people running the audit.