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Kadapa Superintendent of Police Mahesh M. Bhagwat on Tuesday directed cyber cafe owners in Kadapa district to follow prescribed guidelines to check designs of terrorist and extremists who used internet for destructive activities.

Cyber cafe owners should allow persons to use internet only after verifying their identity through any identity card, ration card, PAN card, passbooks or voter identity card and retain a Photostat copy of the identity for perusal by police, he told cyber cafe owners at a press conference here.

Mr. Bhagwat directed them to put up closed circuit television sets in cyber cafes and when they pointed out the high cost involved, he advised them to put up webcams within a fortnight to record the portrait of every net user with a 15-days record backup facility.

Mg Zaw, who runs a video disc stall along Anawratha Road in central Yangon, said he started hawking the storm videos just two days after Nargis struck. “People buy them because they are interested in seeing what happened out there,” he said, eyes warily scanning for police conducting checks.

The discs are packaged in slim plastic holders with paper covers featuring grainy montages of bloated corpses floating in flood waters, collapsed houses and injured people being helped by villagers. Some sellers display them openly; others produce them only on request.

The videos show hand-held camera footage of bloated water buffalo carcasses, wooden boats parked outside roofless buildings and homes flattened by the storm, as well as groups of survivors squatting on roadsides with their few remaining possessions in baskets or bags. In one video, two stray dogs sniff the ground near the corpse of a young woman lying face-up on a coconut palm leaf.

The Janata Dal (S), for instance, has no website to begin with, though some of its members' speeches and tours have been posted on YouTube by the party followers. The Karnataka Pradesh Congress Committee's website too is dull, empty-bellied and seem abandoned as they have not updated the site.

The BJP's election (www.bjpkarnataka.org) site, on the other hand, is rather attractive. It has got ample campaign material — leader's profiles, their speeches, election manifesto and more.

The BJP's site www.vijayeekarnataka.com is completely dedicated to Yeddyurappa and has reams of information on him. It has all the glue to attract visitors — lots of YouTube videos and even a blog on him which is getting ready.

The blog will be up in a day or two. It will have comments from the general public, and Yeddyurappa himself will write his speeches and appeals. Sources say that some of the big names from IT, manufacturing and other sectors have also written for the blog which is expected to be populated shortly.

Meanwhile, one of the key points on BJP's election manifesto reads ‘IT kiosks in all villages', which seems to be in sync with the party's tech friendliness. www.vijayeekarnataka.com, which was launched on April 29, has seen 60,000 visitors.

ULAGUPITCHANPATTI, India -- Two years ago, after graduating from high school at the top of her class, Sukanya Sakkarai put aside her dreams of college and resigned herself to the fate of most young women in this farming village of trampled earth and mud-brick houses: marriage to a stranger in a match arranged by her parents.

Then the Information Age arrived on her doorstep. Life hasn't been the same for Sakkarai, or her village, since.

Today Chiluvuru is on the information technology map of India, thanks to the efforts of `Katragadda Charities' and the State Government.

Chiluvuru became the first `Rajiv Internet village' in India, when Chief Minister Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy inaugurated it on August 20, 2004.

There are about 200,000 cyber cafés in the country with more than 80% owned by individuals. Say café owners in the city, “It is getting difficult to conduct business with impending cyber café regulations and escalating operating costs. An average private cyber café gets about 50-60 footfalls in a day while the likes of Reliance Web World have 125 footfalls per day per store.”

Says Dilip Chaitalia, a café owner in South Mumbai, “Our footfalls have gone down by nearly 50%, with overall business decreasing by as much as 25%.” Also the cost of technology is rising with the advent of faster printers, webcams and regular software upgrades, he adds.

NEW DELHI: Picture this, a seventeen-year old lad being a CEO of a 60-member team with projects in hand worth approximately Rs 2 crore and two offices in the US and one in UK. Handling the ancestral business- No, Suhas Gopinath formed Globals Inc.—a sweat funded organization on his own at the age of 14 from a cyber cafe. Though he wanted to be a vet, he holds no formal degree in IT and is just a class XII pass out.

"My class fellows used to make fun of me that I am a nerd and spent my time in a cyber cafe, but I knew I was chasing a big dream. An organization that will give chance to younger generations, which will not ask for years of work experience but the knowledge," he said.

aboo: Even the smallest of towns has five or six cyber cafes, easily. They have been that popular. Most of them were started in '97 or '98. More than a million people daily depend on cyber cafes for Net access. It's much cheaper than even in the USA.

We estimated at the peak there were more than 5,000 cafes in Mumbai. Currently we estimate around 3,000. On average, they have four to six computer terminals. We estimate more than 1.5 million people are dependent on cyber cafes in Mumbai. On average there are 15,000 computers in the public domain. The industry is very fragmented, so it's difficult to make estimates.

A cyber café works on the premise that a Net savvy individual will come craving for connectivity and speed. The café only has to deliver.

But in India, this truth is bigger than anywhere else in the West. Cyber cafés here are often the only way several thousands of students and Internet enthusiasts can ever hope to get online.

That is because, in India, the cost of owning a computer and connectivity to the Net are still prohibitive.