"Technology is already transforming lives in India, improving education and fueling economic growth. We want to support the continuation of these trends," said Craig Barrett, chief of the world's largest maker of microchips for computers and other electronic gadgets.

Intel is to help India's IT department make technology more accessible to school teachers throughout India.

The US tech giant signed separate pacts with three states -- Uttaranchal, Kerala and Karnataka -- on specific learning and e-government projects.

"Intel is anchoring a community programme in a remote district called Malapuram in Kerala which has turned young children and grandmothers computer literate," said Kerala's IT secretary Aruna Sounderrajan.

"As part of one of the ongoing programmes, Intel wired up 650 cyber cafes in rural Malapuram. Today, villagers and farmers walk into the cyber cafes to use the computers and the Internet. Some even settle their electricity bills using net banking," she added.

"We will scale up these programmes with help from Intel."

The Intel learning programmes will target students in the 10 to 18 age group, said A. Sinha, IT secretary of Uttaranchal state.

Barrett said Intel was looking at India as one possible site for setting up a microchip manufacturing unit.

"I am not going to say no to that question," Barrett said when asked whether India could become the site for Intel's next multi-million dollar microchip manufacturing facility.

"India is one of the several countries that we are evaluating for setting up a manufacturing facility. India is one of the competitors."

Intel has a development centre in the southern Indian technology hub of Bangalore. More than 2,400 software engineers who work at this center design Intel's next generation microchip processors and semi-conductors.

Intel's third-quarter profit jumped 15 percent from a year ago to 1.9 billion dollars, and revenues hit 8.5 billion dollars, up eight percent more than last year.

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