OLPC secures order for 25,000 laptops from India: report
29 Apr 2009
After the Human Recourses ministry's farcical attempt to launch $10-laptop in February for educational purposes in the vast hinterland of the country (See: Rs500 laptop a damp squib), two government organisations and a private sector firm are reported to have placed orders for 25,000 laptops from the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) organisation.
One Laptop per Child (OLPC) is a non-profit organisation initiated by Nicholas Negroponte and others from the MIT Media Lab to design, manufacture and distribute inexpensive laptop computers to provide every child in the world access to knowledge and modern forms of education.
Without naming the government organisations or the private sector firm, Satish Jha, president and CEO of OLPC India said that it had placed orders for 25,000 XO laptops for 1,500 schools and that deliveries would begin in June.
Jha said that the 250,000 laptops will be for children in the suburban and rural areas, which may either not have internet connectivity or the cost of the connectivity could be too high, the laptops will use "Mesh networking", where information can be downloaded from a server, connected through mesh networks.
This will be the first order placed by India after the project failed to impress the then IT minister Arun Shourie in 2001, who felt that the entire project was suspect and the price of $200 for the laptop was too high.
OLPC had first tested a pilot project in 2007 with 20 XO laptops at Dhangarwada village in the Raigad District of Maharashtra and has also been conducting other pilot projects in five schools in Uttar Pradesh.
After being rejected by the central government, OLPC has been trying to sell this project to various state governments and the private sector in the hope that large corporations would donate these laptops to schools in the rural areas as part of their corporate social responsibility.
The XO laptops are rugged, use open source computing, and are so energy efficient that they can be powered manually by a child. They have a built-in wireless, a unique dual-mode display that is readable under direct sunlight. OLPC says the software is designed for children to encourage exploration and creativity.
OLPC had recently announced that it would do away with the current AMD chips in the XO laptop and go in for the VIA C7-M, where the system memory would be enhanced to 1GB and internal storage to 4GB and the prototype mother-board should be ready by next month.
Jha did not say whether the XO laptops to be supplied to India will have this latest enhancement.
But the project is still a tall order for the OLPC as it requires tie ups with various telecom operators for internet connectivity, needs localised educational content and trained teachers to operate the XO laptop as a teaching medium in rural areas.
In 2008, OLPC had tied up with The Digital Bridge Foundation, part of Reliance ADA Group, to start a pilot project covering 25,000 towns and 60,000 villages, but since then, the project seems to have been either shelved or put in cold storage.
