Anasuya Dhanrajgir, 39, logged on to the internet. In the old days she may have taken her astrologer's advice and made the 1450km journey to a temple on the southern tip of India to pay respects to Shani - the Hindu god she was said to have angered.

"I surfed the internet to see if there was a way out," she says.

She found technology offered an easy way to keep the faith - and a new means of communicating with at least some of her religion's 330 million gods and goddesses.

The site - www.prarthana.com - named after the Sanskrit word for worship - offers to conduct prayer rituals for a fee at some 400 temples across India.

With the click of her mouse, Anasuya placed an order for a ceremony, or puja - which she was told would cost 1250 rupees ($46). This prayer service, marked by chanting of Vedic verses and worship of fire, was designed to propitiate the angry god.

Hindu temples offer puja ceremonies depending on the need - good health, success in business, marital bliss and so on. Prices vary according to the service.

Prayers involving simple chanting and offering of flowers come cheap, starting around 50 rupees.

More elaborate ones require a donation of cows and silk saris to poor people, for example, and can cost upwards of 20,000 rupees.

The online service is an extension of a tradition - in Hinduism, one person can perform a temple prayer for another and family members do it often for each other.

"We performed the puja on Anasuya's behalf," website founder K. Ganesan says.

The company sent her an email confirming the ceremony was done, and the temple used a courier to send Anasuya a parcel with part of the offerings, which symbolically conveyed the god's blessings.

"I was happy to know there was a remedy."

When it was time to perform a blessing of her newborn son, Anasuya returned to her computer. This time, she planned the trip to the faraway temple but let the website handle her travel arrangements.

Ganesan estimates the number of websites offering similar services to Hindus has grown to 300 in the past few years. Many of his customers are Indians living abroad and unable to visit home temples.

With religion going hi-tech, entrepreneurs are looking to cash in. The Indian software industry employs about 522,000 people, many of them pious Hindus. Some set up online puja services out of religious faith rather than mere entrepreneurial itch.

The rewards could be enormous in India - the world's second-most-populous country, with more than one billion people, 80 per cent of them Hindus. While fewer than 1 per cent own a personal computer - and even fewer have internet access - Indians are visiting Hindu sites at cyber cafes, where net browsing costs 25 rupees an hour.

Temples themselves can find helpful services online.

Bangalore-based software maker M.R. Balakrishna hopes he has found the answer to every temple's wishes. A devout Hindu, Balakrishna devised an application called Ganati - derived from the Sanskrit word for calculating - to help run temple finances.

Balakrishna, founder of software maker MediaTeck I Solutions, says while visiting a temple he saw it was run in such a haphazard manner devotees would not be able to tell how funds donated to the temple were used.

"This convinced me there was a need for temples to use technology to improve planning and transparency," he says. "The software is running in three temples so far."

Many of India's holy sites and holy people are also using the net. The Venkateswara temple in the southern town of Tirupati, reputed to be the world's richest Hindu temple, gets so many donations that workers use a conveyor belt to transfer the cash, jewels and other offerings to a separate storage building.

www.prarthana.com

www.tirumala.org

www.mediateckisol.com