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27 Jul 2006
The government of India has abandoned plans to order the laptop computers being developed by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project.
India's Ministry of Human Resource Development labelled the $100 laptop project as "pedagogically suspect", according to the Kaumudi newspaper, claiming that there are no proven benefits of providing all children with their own notebook computers.
"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," Education Secretary Sudeep Banerjee told a planning commission.
He added that the project is suffering from an unpredictable timeline. "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," said Banerjee.
"We do not think that [OLPC project leader] Nicholas Negroponte's idea is mature enough to be taken seriously at this stage and no major country is presently following this. Even inside America, there is not much enthusiasm about this."
He concluded that India would be better off investing the funds in expanding secondary education programmes.
The OLPC project aims to build a notebook computer for children in developing nations. The idea is that computers will teach children to think in a more structured manner while allowing them to educate themselves instead of depending on teachers.
The project is led by MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte. In presentations about the project, Negroponte has repeatedly made a case for providing children with notebook computers, pointing to succe ssful projects in the west and developing nations such as Cambodia.
Production of the computers will start once five to 10 million have been ordered and paid for, according to the OLPC website.
Nigeria placed an order for one million OLPC laptops earlier this month and other nations are set to follow including Brazil and Egypt.
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Do you agree?
The India Rejection Backstory
There is more to the India rejection than the Education Minister's "fancy toy" comment. It seems that MIT Media Lab Asia was a great failure and the India government doesn't trust MIT Media Lab to run a project.
Posted by: wayan 11 Aug 2006
Blind Govt!
What would you expect from the present (totally blind with no vision for country's future) Congress govt that always ruled India by keeping indian population uneducated and poor as much as possible?
Posted by: Indian 31 Jul 2006
Promoting the Digital Divide in India
Whether or not children "need technology" or not is really not the question to be asked. The question to be asked and answered is how India can become a stable country where their citizens can be both educated, fed and where children can have dreams of growing up healthy having productive working, lives. Perhaps then the question of having technology would become how can our educated citizens improve their country in the above areas. Politics and political pundants always gets in the way.... let the children both live and learn!
Posted by: rrisk 29 Jul 2006
OLPC or Computers for secondary schools
Right decision. Budget should be better spent on advanced science computers for the secondary schools
Posted by: Meir 29 Jul 2006
No Laptops?
I find it ironic that a country that has greatly improved its economy based on providing tecnology assistance to America would deny technology to its school children. Children still have to pay tuition and buy uniforms to go to schools in the poor parts of the country and I read that small rural communities have to go through multiple changes such as providing a facility and raising money for a teacher just to get a primary school before the government will provide one. Maybe the middle class urban children do not need individual laptops, but in the poor and those in rural areas laptops might be the only opportunity children have to lift themselves from poverty. I realize that India is not a country that believes in taking care of the poor, but if it is ever going to leave its "third world" status it must provide educational opportunities for all children and technology is an important way to do that.
Posted by: Rhonda Browning 28 Jul 2006
Notebooks are not needed for children
What children need in this age is lots of outdoor time with other children, develop social skills and bond with others as the community. There is a lifetime left to learn computers....
Posted by: Raj Kashikar 27 Jul 2006
A wise decision indeed
For a country where a large number of people are before the poverty level, that money could be used to educate the children of those people. It could even be used to improve the quality of the teachers.
Posted by: Anand Joseph 27 Jul 2006
Reaaly ? or is there a agend ?
Ofcourse it would mean that the bulk of those would be better educucated and informed about the wprld at large with the minor issue that they will be so much more diffucult to explot as adults.
Posted by: Pita's Puke 27 Jul 2006