UNNAO, SEPTEMBER 10 Turn left off the Kanpur-Lucknow highway, drive 25 km deep into the heart of mango orchard territory, then stop— otherwise you would drive right into Sarohan’s village pond.

That’s when you spy the 20-metre WiFi tower that looms over a pucca-roof control room, a PCO booth that has a telephone set, and also its jumble of wires, battery-sets and solar power back-up packs.

This unusual WiFi hotspot—where radio frequencies picked up by laptops or phones offer Internet connectivity and telephony without wires—has transformed the lives of the 2,000 villagers who live here.

WiFi is networking through wireless. You can connect computers through radio signals.

Till late last year, only airports, a few cafes, shopping malls and hotels boasted of these seamless strips of internet-connectivity-on-the-move.

But that is set to change as WiFi radio frequencies have been delicensed, and India Inc converts at a furious pace.

For slightly over a year now, Sarohan has been the lone island of connectivity in a sea of worn-out rural roads, rice fields and thatch roofs of Unnao district in Uttar Pradesh.

The nearest phone, a conventional one, is 6 km away, whether you walk north towards Kanpur, or to south, towards Munshiganj.

‘‘It’s a good 12-km walk to a PCO and back today though it used to be a 20-km drive till March this year,’’ explains Mohan K Sharma, coordinator of IIT Kanpur’s Digital Gangetic Plain Project, which has taken phones and internet connectivity to 10 villages in and around Unnao.

Before June last year, a phone call to Kanpur, 45 km from Sarohan, would cost Rs 23—Rs 20 to go to the highway and back by a makeshift local taxi and Rs 3 to actually make the call. ‘‘It was a losing proposition. Half the time, the villagers would simply wake up at 4 am, walk up to the mandi and walk back with the going rates. This was extremely difficult but had to be done during the harvest season,’’ Sharma explains.

But Sarohan gets a lot more than mandi rates from its telephone. During the off-season, the village women have found a unique blessing in their PCO: They use it to call up relatives to send in money. Over the last decade, scores of Sarohan’s young men have moved to Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Delhi or Patna to work in factories.

‘‘Many of the men can send home only Rs 200 to 300 a month, though even that is a lot of money in these parts. As a result, our PCO is mostly visited by women, who regularly call up male relatives in cities for money,’’ says Munnu, who runs the WiFi PCO, maintains its log and runs technical checks on it.

Munnu, about 20 years old and a school pass out, has clocked a tiny profit running the PCO in his middle-of-nowhere village. On an average day, he helps make calls worth Rs 150.

  Ten UP villages are connected now  

• IIT Kanpur’s Digital Gangetic Plain Project has taken phones and internet connectivity to 10 villages in and around Unnao • Till recently, only airports, cafes, shopping malls and hotels had WiFi, but now with WiFi radio frequencies delicensed, a whole world is opening up • Apart from being a source of mandi rates, the phones are used by women to call up their men working outside for money

These answers lie with Professor Bhaskaraman, the 27-year-old IIT graduate who came back from the US to lead the Digital Gangetic Plain project in March 2005.

‘‘You see, the break-even has been computed on the basis of voice telephony. In fact, we want to add a range of services and technologies around the WiFi link that will bring the break-even date much earlier,’’ says Bhaskaraman.

IIT Kanpur’s WiFi story began in 2001, when the first tower was set up on the IIT campus under the Media Lab Asia project. Its international partner, MIT, Mass, has since pulled out and only Indian engineers run the project now.

The scheme started with a simple goal: To establish WiFi as an inexpensive technology to take Internet and voice communication to rural areas.

Today, setting up a WiFi link costs $50-100, while additional equipment (excluding a tower) costs $20-50 apiece, less than one-fifth of the cost of setting up basic telephony or mobile telephony links. ‘‘We’re not saying that WiFi is the answer to all India’s communication problems. We are saying that this is an alternative in rural areas that are prohibitive to other operators because of cost considerations,’’ says Bhaskaraman.

The farthest link of this WiFi tower is in Sarohan, exactly 38 km away, where only voice communication has been provided till date. However, Bhaskaraman’s team has set up a series of Internet links in villages near Sarohan—in Mohanpur, Mandana and Beetur.

‘‘We are running Internet kiosks through NGOs and sections of the leather industry in the area, and now there is demand from Sarohan as well,’’ explains Sharma.