India Changes Course, Orders 250,000 Laptops From One Laptop Per Child Program

After disparaging Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child program as too expensive, the Indian government has caved in. Following the embarrassment over its own $10 laptop — which turned out to be a computing device with a hard disk for storage — the nation signed an agreement to buy 250,000 OLPC laptops for distribution across the country, reported efytimes.com.

In turn, the struggling OLPC program — which has run into problems after large companies refused to cooperate with it — will get a much-needed financial boost from India’s contract. Intel resigned its membership from the project in January 2008, citing Mr. Negroponte’s request that the company stop selling its Classmate Personal Computers below cost.

The One Laptop Per Child Association is a non-profit organization set up to oversee the creation of an affordable educational device for use in the developing world.

In 2006, India’s ministry in charge of education rejected Mr. Negroponte’s initiative, saying it was “impossible to justify an expenditure of this scale on a debatable scheme when public funds continue to be in inadequate supply for well-established needs listed in different policy documents.” Instead of using the OLPC machines, Indian officials planned to make laptops available to schoolchildren for $10 each.

Earlier this year the Indian government released the eagerly-awaited laptops, which were designed by students at the Vellore Institute of Technology, and scientists at the Indian Institute of Science, in Bangalore, and the Indian Institute of Technology, in Chennai. The $10 laptop prototypes weren’t laptops at all, but rather computing devices that came with hard disks to store store e-books, e-journals, and relevant educational material.

So now nearly 1,500 Indian schools will end up getting the OLPC’s latest batch of laptops, according to some reports. —Shailaja Neelakantan