Netting Pune.com

“All this time, the existing sites available on Pune were basically for Non-resident Indians. Nothing was available for Puneites themselves,” he points out. So he decided to tap the “For, By and Of the” principle. “We decided to put Pune on the net. So this would be For the Puneites, By Puneites and Of the Puneites”.

What came up, was an alternate city, all with a mayor, a council and a forum to conduct business in the real sense. The most important component of the site is E-Commerce (aka Electronic Commerce for the uninitiated).

And the idea is rather simple. It is just using the Burlington’s Home Shopping concept on the Net. Of course, the person has to get citizenship first!

Once inducted, it becomes rather simple from thereon. The buyer logs in, hits the site, and browses through the products available. Once satisfied, he or she can place their order and the item asked for is available at their doorstep in five to six hours. Of course, a service charge is levied. And, as Abhijeet puts it, “We only intend to put branded consumer and industrial goods on the site so that there is a certain quality that is maintained”.

And there is much more to the site than just E-Commerce. After all this is slated to be a `happening’ city. So there is a whole lot that is being planned besides the `trade and commerce’. “We plan to set up discussion groups, information sites, chat centres and news and views,” points out Dinesh Thigale, the man in-charge of the project. That means people get to meet a whole lot of other people on the Net and discuss their particular areas of interest. Among the interest groups already identified are films, drama, sports, trekking and tourism, politics, food and science. So you can book your tickets for the cinema theatre or contact a travel agent on the Net to get the urgently needed travel ticket.

The discussion forums will be as interactive as possible. As Abhijeet outlines his plans -“We intend to have people like Dr. Jayant Narlikar here on Saturdays. As people log on they can ask questions and their queries will be answered immediately.” That applies to all their forums that they are planning. If somebody wants to go in for a detailed discussion with another Netizen then he or she can go into separate cyber `rooms’ and chat away.

Later on they also plan to add a news and views component. It will not be a news channel or site, there being a plethora of them already. It will rather be a site where people can post their views and this being the Net, they can get reactions and counter-views immediately, courtesy the inter-active World Wide Web.

Ever since the site was inaugurated on September 20, it has already received 1,200 hits. There has been a plethora of E-mail, some encouraging, some critical but mostly inquisitive. One E-mail goes…“This is bad management. I reached a site but it was under construction.” Which shows that there are a lot of people are keen on checking out this site. It also remains to be seen how good their promises are when the site will be partly activated on October 1 and the rest of the site on October 10. So if you are Netsurfing around that time and you happen to see Shaniwarwada beckoning you to a whole new world, dive in.