[EAS] India declines $100 Laptops

[Peter J. Kindlmann]

(from Edupage, July 26, 2006)

INDIA SAYS NO TO LAPTOPS FOR SCHOOLCHILDREN
The government of India announced that it would not buy laptops from
the One Laptop per Child program, the brainchild of Nicholas
Negroponte. Negroponte's idea is that furnishing every schoolchild in
developing nations with inexpensive laptops--$100 each--will be a boon
to education and will help those countries close the technology gap
with the developed nations of the world. The program, which has support
from AMD, Google, MIT, Nortel, and Red Hat, is expected to begin
shipping machines after it has orders for between 5 and 10 million.
According to Indian Education Secretary Sudeep Banerjee, however, the
country's Ministry of Education did not see pedagogical value in the
laptops. "We do not think that the idea of Prof. Negroponte is mature
enough to be taken seriously at this stage," he said, adding that "we
need classrooms and teachers more urgently than fancy tools."
Separately, however, Nigeria announced that it will order 1 million of
the computers.
The Register, 26 July 2006
http://www.theregister.com/2006/07/26/india_says_no_to_olpc/

-------------------
The story in The Register also has numerous links to various facets of
the OLPC program as envisioned by Negroponte, for now rather bluntly
rejected by India.  --PJK