In Goa’s capital city of Panjim, Deepak Surlakar has just spent a minute completing a task that used to take him more than a week.

Emerging from the Mahiti Ghar (citizen service centre), a bright yellow tin shack, the 50-year-old property developer is clutching a digitally produced copy of a land ownership record. He paid 15 rupees a sheet and did not have to bribe anyone to get it.

He seems happy with his initial brush with the Goan government’s push to become India’s first fully wired state. “It was done in no time,” he said, smiling broadly. “Before, I had to apply for the form and it took eight days.”

Downloading public documents has been possible for five years in Goa, India’s most progressive state, but the fibre-optic cable threaded through tree branches overhead to the kiosk from the land registry office across the street is evidence of an initiative to take its technological edge further.

Goa is going broadband. And, in a project that would be ambitious even in a developed economy, it aims to have it all done by March.

United Telecom Limited (UTL), the Bangalore-based company awarded the contract nearly a year ago, has laid nearly 250km (155 miles) of cable and says that it has completed the first phase of the project – linking the government’s headquarters to district offices via a ten gigabits-per-second network.

By December, district and village administrations will have one gigabits-per-second connectivity and within five months 320,000 households will have access to speeds of up to ten megabits per second. Initially, the aim is to sign up 80,000 homes to bundled access to voice, data, high-speed internet and television services for about 500 rupees a month – a significant discount to buying cable TV, telephone and internet separately.

Users will be able to pause and fast-forward live television, hold video-conferences with friends and colleagues and file tax returns straight to the government server.

It all seems a little fantastic in a country where nearly half the 1.1 billion population does not even have an electric light in the home. Goa, though, is probably the only place in India where this futuristic scenario stands a chance of becoming reality. It is the smallest state, so is relatively easy to manage, as well as being the richest per capita – Goans earn about three times as much as the average Indian. It is already well developed in terms of infrastructure because of the tourism industry, which accounts for half of the state’s GDP. The roads are good, everyone has electricity and nearly 85 per cent of the population is literate, compared with the national average of 35 per cent.

JP Singh, the chief secretary, admits that Goa is “more like a developed economy”. While India is growing at 9 per cent a year, Goa is enjoying a rate of more than 12 per cent. He sees the opportunity for Goa to rival Bombay and Bangalore as a business process outsourcing (BPO) centre. There are already 300 BPOs up and running and two IT parks on the way.

Goa is hoping to attract serious foreign investment. Tourists who flock to the state for its beaches and laid-back vibe may be tempted to stay longer.

“With our bandwidth, someone from the US or Asia would be able to carry on with their business,” Rajendra Pal, the IT secretary, said. “There is already talk of Goa being a first-world state. An American would feel at home here.”

The Goan government has good reason to feel pleased with itself: it is getting a world-class infrastructure for free. UTL is investing 4,000 million rupees (£49.4 million) and will pay 12 per cent of net revenues to the state after the fifth year.

“It’s difficult to say how long it will take India to be a wired nation, but initiatives like this will put pressure on the government to put more services on the internet,” Anirudh Prabhakaran, chief operating officer of 3i Info-tech, a company investing $6 million (£2.9 million) in the e-governance branch of the Goa project, said. “It will act as a catalyst to other states.”

Switched-on state

1961Goa liberated from the Portuguese

1.4m population

58,677 GDP per capita in rupees

12.1% GDP growth

83.5% literacy rate

60% personal computer penetration

1,140 engineering graduates a year

2.4m broadband subscribers in India

7m new mobile subscribers in India every month

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