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India Blocks The OLPC Project

The government of India's previous plans of buying laptop computers developed by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project have been abandoned. The reason: the project is "pedagogically suspect".

According to the Kaumudi newspaper (via Vnunet), India's Ministry of Human Resource Development said there weren't any proved benefits of providing children with their own laptops. Therefore, such a costly expense could not be justified, as other education-related issues were also in need of attention.

"The case for giving a computer to every single child is pedagogically suspect. It may actually be detrimental to the growth of the creative and analytical abilities of the child. We cannot visualise a situation for decades when we can go beyond the pilot stage. We need classrooms and teachers more urgently than fancy tools," (Sudeep Banerjee, Education Secretary)

Banerjee suggested that investing in expanding secondary education programmes would be a much better alternative for India.

Meanwhile, other countries have proved to be very enthusiastic about the idea. Nigeria has already ordered one million OLPC laptops earlier this month, with Brazil and Egypt set to follow soon.

According to the OLPC website, the production of the computers will start once 5 to 10 million have been ordered and paid for.

The aim of the program is to create a Linux-based $100 machine, with a dual-mode display-both a full-color, transmissive DVD mode, and a second display option that is black and white reflective and sunlight-readable at 3× the resolution. The laptop will have a 500MHz processor and 128MB of DRAM, with 500MB of Flash memory; it will not have a hard disk, but it will have four USB ports. The laptops will have wireless broadband that, among other things, allows them to work as a mesh network; each laptop will be able to talk to its nearest neighbors, creating an ad hoc, local area network. The laptops will use innovative power (including wind-up) and will be able to do most everything except store huge amounts of data.