Hansdehar (Haryana): A Haryana village has uploaded itself onto the Internet, giving the outside world a glimpse of life in rural India.
Visitors to Hansdehar village's website, www.smartvillages.org, can see the names, jobs and other details of its 1,753 residents, browse photographs of their shops and read detailed specifications about their drainage and electricity facilities.
Most of the residents can't yet surf the Hansdehar website as the village is not yet connected to the Internet.
But the villagers hope the site - and their imminent first Internet connection - will put them in touch with the world beyond the flooded rice fields surrounding Hansdehar.
"It will be a revolution," said farmer Ajaib Singh. He and other villagers hope the connection with the outside world will help speed up improvements to Hansdehar's woeful infrastructure and services such as a lack of a dispensary and unreliable electricity.
The village has long been neglected by the Indian government, locals complain. "Now we can put our problems on the Web site, and then the government can't say 'we didn't know'," he said.
But younger villagers - most of whom are yet to send their first e-mail - plan to use the Internet to help hasten their exit by searching on-line for college places and jobs in big cities.
In preparation, Jasvir Singh, 21, has hired what is only the second computer in the village to learn to type.
He says he can do 25 words a minute and is getting faster. Singh wants to get into one of India's prestigious institutes of management and one day score a foreign posting.
Quietly-spoken Nanki Devi, 21, says her future will be limited to employment as a housemaid if she stays in the village, whose women demurely veil themselves in the presence of unrelated men.
"Only in a city I can be independent," she explained as she looked shyly towards her feet. These kinds of ambitions are exactly what Kanwal Singh hoped to stir when he set up the Web site for the village he was born in.
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