By IPS Correspondents
BOGOTA, May 3 2000 (IPS)

The House of Culture in Filandia, a town of 16,000 in Colombia’s Andean region, has become the favourite hang- out joint for students from the municipality and nearby towns who in their free-time discover the mysteries of the Internet.

Filandia was chosen for the pilot project of the Communication Ministry’s Internet Programme for Small Municipalities, which this year will install a computer and printer hooked up to the worldwide web in a locale open to the public in 670 towns of 2,000 to 40,000 residents.

Because of the heavy demand, specific schedules have had to be set up in order to allow equal access to the information superhighway by youngsters as well as adults, “who now prefer to sit in front of the computer rather than play pool in the bar,” María Restrepo, director of Filandia’s House of Culture, told IPS.

For youngsters, surfing the web “is like a party, and for adults, this convenient, fast and economical communication tool means a valuable savings of their time,” she added.

Demand has been so high that the mayor’s office has joined in the project, installing two more computers in the House of Culture, after the project installed the first computer on Mar 13.

The Internet Programme for Small Municipalities is part of the Compartel project, designed to provide basic telephony to 6,565 towns which do not yet have telephone services.

Carlos Ballén, the manager of the Compartel project, told IPS that in the small towns involved in the programme, the Communications Ministry will install a locale where “anyone from the community will be able to log onto the Internet, within the scheduled time-limits, at competitive rates.”

The project forms part of a development plan that the government has dubbed “the Leap to Internet”, consisting of making the latest computer technologies available to all sectors of the population.

“We don’t want people in the countryside to feel that the 21st century is leaving them behind,” said Ballén. The aim is to provide access to the latest technologies to “low-income sectors, who cannot afford a computer or a monthly subscription to Internet,” he explained.

The Internet centres function like on-line cafes, but with subsidised rates, and with experts available to provide tips and pointers on how to surf the web.

The main aim of the project is the creation of a government “Intranet”, to which 3.5 million people – of a total population of 40 million – would be connected.

The Intranet forms part of President Andrés Pastrana’s ‘Agenda de Conectividad’, through which 130 million dollars will be invested in social communication projects.

The ‘Agenda de Conectividad’ also includes educational programmes like distance teaching over the Internet, designed to boost the quality of education.

There are presently some 500,000 monthly subscribers to Internet in the large cities of this conflict-torn country – a number that is expected to rise to 700,000 by the end of the year.

But at a price tag of 20 to 40 dollars a month, Colombia’s poor, who account for 45 percent of the population, have no chance of access to the web without a programme like the pilot project in Filandia.

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