From young village women accessing information on crop prices to techies debugging software systems for U.S. banks, India is making gigantic strides into the Information Age. But how long it can offer a low wage haven for the cyberspace revolution remains to be seen. PNS commentator Walter Truett Anderson is a political scientist and author of numerous books, most recently "The Future of the Self." He also directs the Meridian Project.

MADRAS--To a traveler, India in some ways seems unchanging, faithful to its cliches. Roadsides clogged with people and animals; city streets clogged with buses, new cars, old cars, scooters, motor bikes, and of course the eternal slow-moving bullock carts. There are barefoot children, women in saris, men often in very little of anything. Gaudy multicolored temples to local gods are scattered among the huts and shops. Here and there you may even see a street beggar with a flute, serenading a cobra in a basket.

Dig a little deeper and you find other relics of the past -- a caste system, still alive and well although technically abolished decades ago. Vast inequities of wealth, status and power. A paralyzing bureaucracy, now become a vast machinery of corruption and political manipulation.

Yet this in so many ways backward country of a billion people -- which the Economist recently described as an "underachiever" -- is making gigantic strides into the 21st-century world of information/communications technology.

Although not much of a player on the hardware side, India has become a major supplier of technical services and software -- this is now a $3.8 billion industry, employing some 200,000 people and exporting its services around the world. Much of that exporting is done electronically -- by, for example, technicians in Bangalore working via telephone to de-bug huge software systems such as those serving banks and airlines in the U.S.

You can see the industry thriving in places like the 32-acre campus of Pentafour not far from the city of Madras (now renamed Chennai). Except for the statue of the elephant god Ganesh that dominates its sleekly modern lobby, Pentafour could as easily be in Silicon Valley as in the state of Tamil Nadhu.

The company produces various software programs for education and business use, but its main activity is animated movies;. Pentafour is big in Hollywood -- many of its studio rooms are the 21st-century equivalent of the great cartoon factories like Walt Disney Studios. Wandering through them you see, instead of ranks of cartoonists at their drawing-tables, ranks of young technicians gazing into their monitors and using Pentafour software to design details of a forthcoming swashbuckler adventure saga entitled Sinbad: Beyond the Veil of Mists.

Indians like to say they have a natural aptitude for working with computers, growing out of the country's traditional respect for education and the high mathematical skills many Indians possess. It also helps, of course, that most educated Indians speak English.

Whatever the reason, the country is making a unique adaptation to the Information Age. You can see this in various projects to adapt the new technologies to the needs of the poor and under-educated.

For example, only a couple hours' drive south from the Pentafour campus, in the Pondicherry region, small farmers and fishermen are learning how to make use of computer technology in their traditional occupations.

This experimental program of the M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, headed by the agricultural scientist who helped launch India's Green Revolution in the 1970s, sets up "information villages," each with one or more computers, operated mostly by young women, who have learned to plug into sources of practical data -- availability of seeds and fertilizers, weather forecasts, crop prices in nearby markets.

In the past, small farmers usually had no way of knowing how prices might vary from one place to the next. With accurate information, they frequently find it worthwhile to take their products to markets other than the ones they customarily use.

Information about government programs is also popular -- Indian governments frequently set up assistance programs for small farmers that the farmers never find out about.

In a nearby coastal village, fishermen who throw their nets into the Bengal Sea more or less the way they have for centuries, now do it under the guidance of the World Wide Web -- information from satellites about changing ocean currents and movements of schools of fish.

India's activities in cyberspace all have risks and shortcomings. The country's software industry faces the continual threat, in today's fast-moving and highly competitive global economy, that some other country with smart people and relatively low wages will move in and take its business. There is also a sizable brain drain to the U.S. and other places with higher pay levels for such skills.

The information villages program seems extremely successful at this point -- but it is reaching only five villages out of thousands. However, they do offer hope that India, for all its anchors to the past, may not always be an underachiever.