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John Ribeiro is an ex-Margao journalist based in Bangalore, who writes
on IT issues for the overseas media. FN
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/index.cfm?newsid=6680
India may decline $100 laptop program
Scheme is 'pedagogically suspect'
John Ribeiro
India may not go in for the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) programme,
which aims to deliver laptops priced at $100 (about £54) to school
students, according to reports.
India's education secretary Sudeep Banerjee is reported to have
written last month to the country's Planning Commission that the case
for giving a computer to every single child is pedagogically suspect,
and may actually be detrimental to the growth of creative and
analytical abilities of the child, according to a report this week in
The Times of India, the country's largest newspaper.
Banerjee was not available to comment on these reports as he is
currently "on tour".
In the letter to the Planning Commission cited by the newspaper,
Banerjee wrote that if it has the kind of money that would be required
for the OLPC scheme, it would be appropriate to use it for spreading
secondary education in the country, for which a concept paper has been
lying with the Planning Commission for approval since November last
year.
"We need classrooms and teachers more urgently than fancy tools,"
Banerjee wrote. This is a view held by a number of government agencies
and NGOs (non-governmental organisations), which hold that the focus
on taking technology to India's poor overlooks other key requirements
such as water, food, and basic education of the country's deprived
sections.
The OLPC is a nonprofit organisation in Cambridge, Massachusetts, set
up to research and develop a $100 laptop that is to be distributed to
children through government initiatives. The low-cost Linux laptop
initiative was first announced by Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of the
OLPC, in January last year, at the World Economic Forum in Davos,
Switzerland. Negroponte is on leave from his position as director of
the MIT Media Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
If India backs out of the OLPC project, this will be the second time
Negroponte encounters a setback in that country. In 2003, MIT Media
Laboratory pulled out of Media Laboratory Asia, set up in 2001 in
collaboration with the Indian government to take technology to India's
rural masses. The government cited differences of opinion over the
focus of the lab.
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