BBC reports that an Indian PC manufacturer, HCL Infosystems, is helping the Indian government to reach their target of increasing the number of PCs-  from 15 million today and five million net connections to 75 million computers and 45 million net connections by 2010 - through the introduction of $250 PCs to the market running Microsoft XP Starter Edition.

From the HCL Infosystems press release:

"HCL's most affordable PC range for India starts with Rs 9990 [$225] that has a 1 GHz Processor, 128 MB RAM, 40 GB Hard Disk, 15" Digital Color Monitor, 52X Optical Drive, Keyboard & scroll mouse. It will be ready to support applications like word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, and web browsing, e-mail clients, audio Video playback. It will come bundled with multi-lingual fonts like Tamil etc.

HCL is also releasing in this range PCs based on Intel architecture as well the PCs that come with Microsoft's Special Starter Edition"