Baramati Goes WiMax Sugarcane heartland and Sharad Pawar stronghold, Baramati has become India's first taluka to introduce WiMax, or wide area wireless broadband, across a hundred villages. The effect is startling.

Business Today, December, 2006 by T.V. Mahalingam

Fourteen-year-old Aarti Dhawan flips open her sleek, black Compaq laptop and conjures a PowerPoint slide for my benefit-all with a beatific smile. She then clicks on an Excel spreadsheet and explains the month's expenses to her 33-year-old uncle, Santosh Dhawan. A sugarcane field is an unlikely place to use a laptop, but if you are in Baramati, the sugarcane heartland of Maharashtra, you might not find many other places to use one. The shy, class nine student first saw a computer about two years ago at a computer lab in her school. Since then, Aarti has not only managed to master simple applications like Word, Excel and PowerPoint, but has also coaxed her uncle, a small farmer with 30 acres of land, to open an e-mail account and surf the internet. A year ago, they purchased a...

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