Hi
I am going to be in India in December till Jan. and except for 23rd dec. to 6th Jan. pretty open to days outs in the villages as suggested by Sumit. Am pretty good at internet and stuff and happy to teach our tais and obviously be taught by them too in return on various aspects of life 
One thing has been coming to my mind. Has anyone properly checked out the Akshay project website. Just wanted to point out that its a state government driven project.
Something about the project [things to be considered in bold]
The Akshaya project in the rural Malappuram district of Kerala, India, is the first district-wide e-literacy project in India, and one of the largest known Internet Protocol (IP)
based wireless networks. Through a test network of over 600 village telecenters, known as e-Centers, Akshaya has conducted one of the world's largest computer literacy drives, claiming to reach over 600,000 households, representing more than 3.6 million people, in less than 6 months. The project has created a
unique brand of state-funded computer access centers, and simultaneously led to
a massive wireless infrastructure, providing a wide range of services and making way to many future opportunities. This paper analyzes Akshaya's approach to e-literacy, telecenter sustainability and entrepreneurship, and its goals of using the technology infrastructure to piggyback a number of social services. . The project is a
state-private partnership, in which the state agency Kerala State IT Mission (KSITM) planned the project, set up the connectivity infrastructure, marketed the idea, developed an e-literacy program and created an initial suite of applications. The physical space, equipment, and operations of the telecenters (known as e-Centers) were responsibilities of local entrepreneurs, selected by the state government in conjunction with local village council members. Each e-Center was required to have at least 5 computers, a printer, scanner, and high bandwidth connectivity, and KSITM planned the geographic locations in such a way that no house in the district was more than 3 km from a telecenter.
E-literacy was the first phase of the project, during which every household could send one member to the local e-Center to acquire training in the basics of computing. The state paid about 85% of the cost of this training as incurred by the entrepreneurs. Following the e-literacy phase, all the
e-Centers were free to operate as cyber cafés (with recommended rates for charging), and as training centers for a variety of services for the local areas including online payment and e-government services.In 2000, the state government in Kerala initiated an e-governance transaction enabling mechanism called FRIENDS, which offered integrated computerized payment counters for citizens at each of the district headquarters, for over 1000 combinations of services. The Kerala government has a stated mission of equipping all its local governing bodies (over 1200 in all) with computing facilities, by providing both the requisite training to
start using these, as well as locally-relevant content and services for their sustenance. The Akshaya project has been a continuation of this. The seeds of the project were in a demand by the village councils (panchayats) in Malappuram, northern Kerala, to the Information Technology Minister in April 2002 with a proposal of district-wide computer literacy – for which the councils offered a sum of
Rs. 6 million from their budget (~$133,000).
The state government took the idea forth, and converted it into a telecentre project deciding to use Malappuram as the initial test-bed, with the end goal of replicating the project throughout the state of 32 million people. The idea was to layer the computer training with a state supported network of public computing points, so that people had the opportunity of taking their learning to the next level. The state appointed the KSITM chief, M. Sivasankar as the district collector of Malappuram to oversee the project’s implementation. The planning and implementation was done over a fairly short time span, and less than two years passed between the initial ideas which were doing rounds in 2002, and the full-scale operating network with telecenters and the e-literacy project.
The e-Centers were planned across Malappuram such that each e-Center serviced approximately 1000 families – thus each center was assigned a list of households from the local neighborhood – and the persons from that list could get
their subsidized e-literacy training only from their assigned e-Center.
While most
entrepreneur franchisees for the e-Centers were selected through a government tender announcement as new e-Centers, about 158 e-Centers were created by converting existing cybercafés. Each e-Center was created at the cost of approximately Rs. 200,000 to the entrepreneur, and is connected through a high-bandwidth connection to the Internet.The e-literacy was done through tutor neutral CD-ROM based content consisting of 10 training modules of 90-minutes each and was distributed to all e-Centers. The modules were played, like videos on PCs, with people watching the process and a multiple-choice test at the end of the last module. Every user was assumed to pass the test, and every user who went through the process was certified e-literate.
The e-literacy for the entire district was completed by February 2004 – thus each household in the district had at least one member familiar with basic computing concepts. This in effect meant the person had a basic understanding of what a computer is and how it works, and what some of its applications may be. Students didn’t learn to operate any specific applications in the e-literacy phase, though the course design did facilitate better decision-making among its graduates on what computers meant to their daily lives, and how these can be used in the future
The project emphasized on intensive training for entrepreneurs for economic sustainability, each entrepreneur was trained in one of six focus areas – including multimedia, data operations, software, hardware, financial services, and community building. The set of e-Centers was geographically broken up into clusters of six (usually one Panchayat area) and within each cluster, each entrepreneur got a different type of focus area training. Thus one panchayat had only one hardware e-Center, and so on. The objective behind this was initially that computer access and training may not be adequate drivers for business for e-Centers, thus layering on additional technology-related services gives these centers a better chance of economic sustainability.
Intensive training for entrepreneurs for economic sustainability, each entrepreneur was trained in one of six focus areas – including multimedia, data operations, software, hardware, financial services, and community building. The set of e-Centers was geographically broken up into clusters
of six (usually one Panchayat area) and within each cluster; each entrepreneur got a different type of focus area training. Thus one panchayat had only one hardware e-Center, and so on. The objective behind this was initially that computer access and training may not be adequate drivers for business for e-Centers, thus layering on additional technology-related services gives these centers a better chance of economic sustainability.
A relevant outcome Akshaya is related to the importance of the entrepreneur, his skills and level of involvement. The skill of any tele-center owner is important, but in the context of Akshaya this is even more so than in other tele-center initiatives, because in this project the entrepreneur was the person to go door to door, selling the idea of the e-literacy to get all the households in their assigned localities to participate. This has been an excellent way of selling the concept to the entire community, because in addition to the entrepreneurs visiting home to home, the state’s underwriting of the concept, alongside the village councils’ stamp of approval created an excellent credibility for the project. In fact, several of the entrepreneurs at the end of the e-literacy
Please do not consider it as a discouragement. Just a check on what we are aspiring to. It is not work of individuals. Therefore, we cannot benchmarks our potential work in e-literacy with this project. The key here might be to hold a dialogue with the state government and make such suggestions. I am also working onm something called Human Capital. One of the best ways to develop this resource called human capital is to have suggestion programs to facilitate innovation and creativity. Haryana government should have a reward based suggestion programs which would encourage people to think of creative ways in which the state could be driven forward economically [and have the political will and readiness to implement them].
The main issue here is overcoming the Digital Divide (the haves and have nots of the internet world). It is not about teaching sundu to fly a rocket, its about who will be equipped to handle the future world which will mainly be based on the internet. The people on the 'have not' side of the digital divide (i.e. majority from our jat states) are definitely going to lose out (even if they are doing agriculture). The world is going to be an internet world. If the state governments are really concerned about the development of their states than this is an imperative intervention they should seriously think about.
On an individual level, I would be happy to spend my time if it results in e-literacy of even one person. So please count me in for this groupwork.
...kerala government is also A Government...right? But I will follow your advice and not go on defending governments...