Hello Raghu,

As I said earlier, I am not much aware of programmer prices but one thing is for sure that in my lab, people make simple 8051 programmers costing a total of around 300 rupees, but they are not 'certified' and cannot program other microcontrollers.

I agree with you that universal programmers like the one you were mentioning should cost around INR 6000.

Just to clear another misunderstanding that you might have. I have not fractured P2.7. This pin got shorted with ground internally.

I plan to buy a new microcontroller and will try to implement Erik's no-touch ISP.