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HLL to set up 1,000 i-Shakti kiosks in AP
November 03, 2004 18:16 IST
Hindustan Lever Ltd, which had launched an Internet-based rural information service i-Shakti in Andhra Pradesh, expects to set up over 1,000 such kiosks by the end of the year in the state.
The company opened its 250th kiosk at Puttapaka village of Nalgonda district on Wednesday, extending its services to Nalgonda, Visakhapatnam, West Godavari and East Godavari districts, HLL said in a release in Mumbai.
i-Shakti is an IT-based rural information service network that has been developed to provide information and services to meet villagers' needs in medical, health and hygiene, animal husbandry, agriculture, education and women's empowerment among others.
The programme is being rolled out in association with Andhra Pradesh's Rajiv Internet Village Programme, it said adding, it is an extension of HLL's Project Shakti.
Meanwhile, the company is also planning to extend its reach of Project Shakti to over 100,000 villages by 2005 from the present 20,000 villages in 196 districts of Andhra Pradesh Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Tamil Nadu among others.
The scaling up will result in creating over 25,000 entrepreneurs and helping over 10 crore (Rs 100 million) rural consumers, it said. Project Shakti is aimed at creating incomes for under-privileged rural women by providing a sustainable micro enterprise opportunity, it added.