This was announced by PV Jayakrishnan, secretary, IT ministry at Pune on Tuesday. The state governments have agreed to allot building space for these centres. A pilot project in two blocks of each of the states and six blocks in Assam will be set up by NIC by August 15, 2000. The remaining blocks will be covered in two years time. Jayakrishnan was attending the 13th foundation day of the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC).

C-DAC is setting up an e-governance demonstration centre at the Ministry of Information Technology, New Delhi. This centre will showcase popular e-governance applications for various states in the country, RK Arora, C-DAC's executive director said.

To mark the occasion C-DAC launched the PARAM Anant, a low-cost supercomputing solution based on an open frame architecture, commodity processors and networks. This will make supercomputing more accessible and economical with all the features of the 100 gigaflops PARAM 10000. Talaash - the first Indian language search engine developed by C-DAC was also launched on Tuesday. Talaash aids search for contents in Hindi. Powered by the C-DAC's GIST technology, Talaash will enable net browsers to submit their favourite links and Websites related to India and Indian language content at Talaash.

Development work is on to develop Gujarati, Bengali and Tamil search engines. Other language products to hit the market are a multimedia portal created by C-DAC to promote multimedia use in Indian languages. With these new products C-DAC is targeting more than 100 per cent growth in turnover. During 1999-2000 C-DAC's revenue went up to Rs 70 crore, up from last year's Rs 38 crore.