India Backs Out Of $100 Laptop Program

The Indian government has decided to back out of the ‘One Laptop Per Child’ (OLPC) programme, designed to provide children and educators in developing countries with a simple-to-use computer costing $100 each. The Ministry of Human Resource Development reconsidered its earlier decision to implement the program offered by MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte, saying there are no proven benefits of providing all children with their own laptops. In a letter to India’s Planning Commission, Education Secretary Sudeep Banerjee reportedly wrote, “The case for giving a computer to every single person is pedagogically suspect. It may actually be detrimental to the growth of creative and analytical abilities of the child”. He further mentioned that the education ministry should spend its money to strengthen secondary education in the country in terms of classrooms and teachers, rather than on “fancy tools”. Negroponte will not begin assembling and shipping units until some 5 million to 10 million computers are ordered and paid for, so OLPC’s success depends largely on its adoption in large countries and India’s decision could represent a major blow to the initiative. The project is supported by AMD, Google and Red Hat and includes countries like China, Brazil, Egypt, Thailand and Nigeria, which has already placed an order for 1 million laptops. Read more here.