Indian village uploads itself onto Internet (Reuters)

HANSDEHAR, India (Reuters) - An Indian village has uploadeditself onto the Internet, giving the outside world a glimpse oflife in rural India.

Visitors to Hansdehar village's Web site(www.smartvillages.org) can see the names, jobs and otherdetails of its 1,753 residents, browse photographs of theirshops and read detailed specifications about their drainage andelectricity facilities.

Most of the residents can't yet surf the Hansdehar Web siteas the village is not yet connected to the Internet.

But the villagers hope the site -- and their imminent firstInternet connection -- will put them in touch with the worldbeyond the flooded rice fields surrounding Hansdehar, locatedin a rich agricultural belt in the northern state of Haryana.

"It will be a revolution," said farmer Ajaib Singh.

He and other villagers hope the connection with the outsideworld will help speed up improvements to Hansdehar's woefulinfrastructure and services such as a lack of a dispensary andunreliable electricity. The village has long been neglected bythe Indian government, locals complain.

"Now we can put our problems on the Web site, and then thegovernment can't say 'we didn't know'," he said.

But younger villagers -- most of whom are yet to send theirfirst email -- plan to use the Internet to help hasten theirexit by searching on-line for college places and jobs in bigcities.

In preparation, Jasvir Singh, 21, has hired what is onlythe second computer in the village to learn to type. He says hecan do 25 words a minute and is getting faster.

Singh wants to get into one of India's prestigiousinstitutes of management and one day score a foreign posting.

Quietly-spoken Nanki Devi, 21, says her future will belimited to employment as a housemaid if she stays in thevillage, whose women demurely veil themselves in the presenceof unrelated men.

"Only in a city I can be independent," she explained as shelooked shyly toward her feet.

These kinds of ambitions are exactly what Kanwal Singhhoped to stir when he set up the Web site for the village hewas born in.

NEW OPPORTUNITIES

There are few jobs available in Hansdehar beyond farming orrunning small shops supplying goods to farmers.

While the richest one or two households own cars, most havecows parked in their front yards. The dusty roads are almostcompletely empty of traffic, bar the occasional farmer chuggingpast atop a tractor, bhangra music blaring.

The village council -- or panchayat -- is pictured on theWeb site holding a meeting about a missing bull. It was neverfound, villagers say, suspecting theft.

Kanwal Singh, who long ago left to work as a Web sitedeveloper for the local government in Chandigarh, said thatuntil recently a lack of opportunities left villagers with fewoptions beyond agriculture.

On a recent visit he gave a dozen or so villagers a mildscolding, telling some of them they lacked initiative. No oneanswered back.

"Some of the young people here have a lot of potential andthey just aren't reaching it," he later told Reuters, visiblyfrustrated.

Which is why he set about convincing the village council ofthe benefits a Web site and an Internet connection would bring.

Few villagers had much of an idea about the Internet, butSingh was soon able to explain the fundamentals.

Pick any Bollywood actress, he told them in a slideshowpresentation, and you can access hundreds of photographs ofher.

But he was quick to highlight the net's other uses.

Now Hansdehar farmers hope they will be able to get betterprices for their crops by trading online through the NationalCommodity & Derivatives Exchange Ltd., cutting out middlemen.

Carpenters and masons will tout their services online.Others will upload their resumes to job hunting Web sites whenthe village's first Internet point is hooked up in KanwalSingh's mother's house in the coming weeks.

Hazoor Singh, a local maths teacher, will have space on theWeb site to publish his forthcoming paper, in which hedescribes parallels between the nature of God and mathematicalset theory.

And at least one young bachelor said he would startbrowsing for a potential wife.

But the grand aim is to encourage more of India's 640,000villages to upload themselves and unite in online networks toadvance the cause of rural India, home to a tenth of humanity.

"We had to start somewhere, so why not here? Charity beginsat home," says Kanwal Singh. "But now all the nearby villagesare impressed and they say they want a site of their own."

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