India may decline Negroponte's $100 laptop program

India may not go in for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program led by Nicholas Negroponte, which aims to deliver laptops priced at $100 to school students, according to reports this week in Indian media.

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 the Planning Commission has the kind of money that would be required for the OLPC scheme, it would be appropriate to utilize 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 nongovernmental organizations (NGO) who hold that the focus on taking technology to India's poor overlooks other key requirements like water, food, and basic education of the country's deprived sections.

The OLPC is a nonprofit organization 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 set back in India. 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 Indian government cited differences of opinion over the focus of the lab.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.