HYDERABAD, India UN Secretary General Kofi Annan on Saturday urged India to join hands with other developing countries to close the digital divide between its haves and have-nots.

Annan told a meeting of business leaders in the Indian IT showcase city of Hyderabad that the information technology boom in India should be kept in perspective, AFP reported.

"It is not a magic formula that is going to solve all our problems by itself," said Annan, on the final day of his three-day India visit which wraps up a South Asia tour.

"Even in India, half the villages still lack a working telephone," the UN chief pointed out.

At the same time, he recognized that it was potentially an "enormously powerful" tool.

"Imaginatively applied it can offer poor countries the chance to leapfrog some of the long and painful stages of development that other countries have had to go through."

Annan appealed to Indian IT experts to offer their expertise and assistance to other developing nations, especially in Africa where he said many countries were laying the groundwork for a digital revolution of their own.

"We talk a lot about south-south cooperation, but practice it too little," he said.

Annan spoke of the "real danger" that the world's poor would be excluded from the knowledge-based global economy.

"The United Nations wants to harness this power for the benefit of all the world's people," he said.

"We are particularly concerned about the digital divide, about the growing gap between information haves and have-nots."