A 21-year-old Muslim woman is proving a trailblazer in more ways than one as she takes part in an ambitious drive to bring the Internet to a conservative part of southern India.
Daughter of an agricultural worker in the overwhelmingly Muslim district of Malappuram in the palm-fringed coastal state of Kerala, Jaseela's normal destiny would have been to marry young and start a family.
Instead, she graduated from university in economics and borrowed 250,000 rupees (US$5,390) from a bank to set up an e-learning center and help bring about a revolution in her community.
"By my age, most girls are married, but my father supported me when I wanted to start the business," said Jaseela, the fifth of seven children. "Since I opened the center, I've trained more than 300 people."
It's a big change for the region and Jaseela, who is popularly known by one name, is helping propel it with her business called Aykshaya (Eternal). She bought six computers and rented a room in Malappuram to teach villagers the basics of operating a computer.
Now the government has declared Malappuram, which has a population of three million, e-literate. It says at least one member from each of the district's 650,000 households is computer literate.
"This is the first district in India to be declared e-literate," said Aruna Sundaram, the top technology bureaucrat in Kerala, which already is known as India's most literate state with 89 percent of its population able to read and write.
"All this in a Muslim-dominated district which is traditional and conservative. A woman can step out only for consulting a family doctor, for a family wedding or for shopping. Now of the total people trained, 50 percent are women," said IT secretary Sundaram.
"The region had no access to computers earlier," said Sundaram. "Access, skills and content had to build from scratch."
So far, Jaseela's business is doing well.
"The government paid me [a subsidy of] 100,000 rupees and I hope to make my business profitable soon when more people do their business via the Internet," said Jaseela, one of the few women in the village who do not wear an all-enveloping burqa. "I've already earned 50,000 rupees."
Government authorities said tribespeople, fishermen, children and agricultural workers are lining up at 637 Aykshaya centers to learn how to operate computers and get on the net.
Now a wireless broadband network runs through the hilly terrain connecting the centers spread across 3,600km2 -- a region where cellphones rarely work.
The Kerala government, in a bid to rake in more revenue for entrepreneurs like Jaseela, has introduced e-payment facilities and villagers can pay power bills, apply for passports and file police complaints through the Internet.
Each center has Internet, data, voice and video access and a customer can use services such as Internet-telephone, videoconferencing and e-mail.
Some 4,000 personal computers have been installed in the centers and the computer requirement for the rollout to the entire state is estimated at 100,000 by the end of next year.
To boost use it has also created content in the local Malayalam language to enable farmers to get online information on corps, fertilizers and the monsoon, educate students and help people consult doctors through the network.
"The future will depend on how the community uses the network and how service providers help the government to speed up the expansion," Sundaram said.
For Ramlath Palaparambu, 26, whose husband is one of around 300,000 from the region working in the Gulf, the future is here.
"I used to be scared of this computer machine. I'm in awe at how I learned to use it. I can now chat with my husband in the Gulf," said Palaparambu.
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