Thanks to the efforts of an engineer who left India in the late 60s for the West, an unusually tech-savvy school in this village is preparing to meet the world halfway in computer literacy.
Boasting of an entire computer laboratory, the school in Avinayakipuram village on the banks of the Tamraparni river, about 50 km from Tirunelveli, houses 24 machines which have over the last five years acquainted 2,000 students with computer skills.
This year the first batch of students who have had computer lessons for a full five years will pass out from the school.
The CEO of DyAnsys Inc. in San Francisco and the head of DyAnsys India and DyAnsys Switzerland, S. Nageshwar, said he wanted "to do something in my country" during a trip to India in 1998.
The lack of computers for the children in this school was his cue.
The village's small school, built in 1916, soon got a computer wing near the main building with two large television sets hooked up for interactive sessions.
About 1,000 families live in Avinayakipuram and 400 children study in the local government school that runs Class 3 to 10.
Compaq and TVS Electronics donated machines and keyboards and Nageshwar contributed to setting up the laboratory in the school.
Initially, teachers were hard on the ground. Dhanalakshmi, a student of the same school, completed computer training to become the first teacher there.
Now the school has four computer teachers and an art teacher who teaches drawing on the desktop.
"When we first began, educated housewives from the neighbourhood thronged the computer classes, all clamouring to learn," Nageshwar, who still retains his Indian passport and spends two to three months in a year in his village, told IANS.
Dhanalakshmi said: "We let them use the facility... but now we cannot cope. The school already has too many children. We keep the computer lab open from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m."
Even six-year-olds from the elementary school come here for classes.
Basic, MS Word and multilingual office suite software have been provided by TVS Electronics in collaboration with Modular Infotech Pvt Ltd, a software company that developed the standard 'Ankur' which translates into 14 Indian languages.
"To get computer lessons in Tamil was a big breakthrough," Nageshwar said.
A teacher here added: "We want our students to know the basics of desktop publishing, to be able to use the technology as a diagnostic tool, as an enabling process so that they go out into the world with skills that can help make a living anywhere in the world, though they come from this remote village."