Gewog Community Centres (CCs)

Bhutan's Ministry of Information and Communications set out in 2009 to establish one Community Centre (CC) in each of the country's 205 gewogs (sub-districts), extending fibre connectivity built under the Asian Development Bank-supported SASEC Village Network component down to local level. Centres were intended to offer both community-to-citizen services — photocopying, scanning, printing, basic computer courses — and government-to-citizen services such as civil registration, forest permits and employment applications, with day-to-day operation later placed under Bhutan Postal Corporation.

According to ITU and ADB/SASEC project records, 182 of the planned 205 Community Centres had been established, of which 130 were connected via broadband internet. However, Bhutan Broadcasting Service's 2014 field reporting from Trashigang found many centres non-functional, under-equipped or entirely unconnected — one gewog, Kangpara, had none — with operators undertrained and operational authority disputed between gewog administrations and Bhutan Postal Corporation. Paro Dzongkhag's own service data records average footfall of only 3 to 15 visits per centre per day.

In June 2025, the Prime Minister's Office launched a parallel Integrated Service and Contact Centre programme, funded by the Government of India under Bhutan's 13th Five-Year Plan, explicitly framed as complementing rather than replacing the existing Community Centres and offering 56 services from 49 agencies, with plans to extend further into gewogs and CCs.

No rigorous independent impact evaluation of the Community Centres — covering literacy gains, internet-penetration change or aggregate beneficiaries — was found in publicly available sources; the documented evidence instead shows a large but only partially functional rural access network, making this a genuine cautionary case on the operational sustainability challenges of last-mile telecentre programmes.

Read the full analysis: https://www.bbs.bt/229781/