Malappuram, in Kerala, will become the first district in the country to have wireless Internet access deployed throughout the district.

The deployment is part of Akshaya, the Kerala government's ambitious project for 100 percent e-literacy in the state.

Mallapuram will be the first e-literate district in the country by January 1, 2004.

As a result of the wireless deployment, over 600 Akshaya centres will get intranet connectivity with access to an 'always on' Internet.

One Akshaya centre caters to 1,000-1,500 households. A centre, typically, has a server and about five to ten PCs and costs about Rs 3-3.5 lakh (Rs 300,000-350,000) to set up.

The centres are purely a private initiative---a local entrepreneur puts up a centre.

"Every centre is set up such that it is not more than 2.5 to 3 kilometers away from a group of villages nearby. The Akshaya project tries to build on Kerala's strength as a 100 percent literate State. From there we now want to move to a 100 percent e-literate state," explains Aruna Sundararajan, Secretary for IT, Government of Kerala.

The wireless infrastructure throughout the district will ensure that every centre has an always-on connection that will support data and voice. It will also support applications like Net browsing, Voice over IP, multimedia, video conferencing and e-learning.

Each centre will also get 2 mail IDs with a space of 2MB and a minimum download of 500 MB--- all at speeds of 64 KBPS.

The entire infrastructure, which covers 3550 square kilometers of the Malappuram district and costs Rs 3 crore (Rs 30 million) has been funded by the Kerala government.

The wireless infrastructure works on hub and spoke model. A main gateway along with a network operations centre and data centre has been set up at Malappuram. From there, six or seven spokes or points of presence have been set up in a radius of around 10-15 kilometers using point to point radio links.

From there, the connectivity has been extended using Vine, a patented technology of Wi-LAN, Canada. Thereafter, base stations using Wi-Fi or 802.11b has been put in place.

Malappuram, says Kunahalikutty, Minister for IT and Industries in the Kerala government, was chosen because the idea for the project evolved in a small way from the district panchayat.

The district panchayat officials had gone to the Kerala government asking for a computer training programme to be run in the district. From there, the scope of the programme got expanded to evolve into the Askshaya e-literacy project for the entire State.

In Malappuram itself, the over 600 Akshaya centres will cover 600,000 families.

Setting up a wireless connectivity infrastructure has not been easy. The two major challenges for the project have been getting the public-private partnership right and bringing connectivity to all the centres.

To tackle the second one, the State Department for IT, pondered over the numerous connectivity choices like fibre, cable and leased line.

However, the hilly terrain and abundant vegetation meant that it had to finally choose to go wireless.

Without the wireless connectivity, only 30 percent of all Akshaya centres had access to the Internet via dial-up.

There are still villages in Malappuram that have no access to telephones.

However, the government is confident that in two months time they will have access to an Akshaya centre.

Tulip IT services, a Rs 210 crore (Rs 2.10 billion) company, is building the wireless infrastructure.

It will add a single equipment, called the 'customer premise equipment' to every Akshaya centre to make it enabled for the wireless connectivity.

As part of the project to make the state e-literate, a training programme has also been launched for Rs 12 crore (Rs 120 million). The programme is again based on a public-private partnership model.

The government has offered Rs 8 crore (Rs 80 million) for the training, while private entrepreneurs have pitched in about Rs 4 crore (Rs 40 million).

Every individual has to pay Rs 20 to learn 15 modules spread over 15 days that will ultimately make him or her e-literate.

The e-literacy campaign has covered 400,000 of the 600,000 families in the district. The entire district is expected to be e-literate by January 1, 2004.

After the training programme will be extended to the rest of the districts in the state.

Meanwhile, in the Akshaya centres in Malappuram, rural online banking, e-enabled education centres, tele-jobs, assisted healthcare and e-posts are just some of the applications that are running.

The Akshaya project has also resulted in a huge growth in the local hardware and software industry. 3,500 computers have been purchased for 600 centres.

In the entire state, the requirement for PCs is estimated to be more than 100,000.

The government is also helping develop applications in the local language of Malayalam.

"The entire model is entrepreneur driven to make it economically viable and self sustaining. The local content will be in areas of agriculture, tourism and education so that people find it useful," says Sundararjan.

The Kerala government hopes to extend the Malappuram  Akshaya project to cover the entire state over the next two years. It also hopes to encourage entrepreneurs to set up nearly 10,000 Akshaya centres throughout the state's 14 districts.

"By 2006, all fourteen states of Kerala will have Akshaya centres and the state will be completely e-literate," promises Kunahalikutty.