Owner-operated computer kiosks allow villagers to get online
ULAGUPITCHANPATTI, India, Oct. 12 — 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.
Scouts from a communications company approached the teenager last year, when she was working one day a month as an accountant for a village credit cooperative, and asked if she was interested in opening a computer-equipped “information kiosk” in the village, which at that point didn’t even have a telephone.
Sakkarai was apprehensive. “I told them, ‘I really don’t know if I can do this,’ ” she recalled. “So they turned around and asked,...