India Says No To Laptops For Schoolchildren

The government of India announced that it would not buy laptops from the One Laptop per Child program, the brainchild of Nicholas Negroponte. Negroponte’s idea is that furnishing every schoolchild in developing nations with inexpensive laptops–$100 each–will be a boon to education and will help those countries close the technology gap with the developed nations of the world. The program, which has support from AMD, Google, MIT, Nortel, and Red Hat, is expected to begin shipping machines after it has orders for between 5 and 10 million.

According to Indian Education Secretary Sudeep Banerjee, however, the country’s Ministry of Education did not see pedagogical value in the laptops. “We do not think that the idea of Prof. Negroponte is mature enough to be taken seriously at this stage,” he said, adding that “we need classrooms and teachers more urgently than fancy tools.”

Separately, however, Nigeria announced that it will order 1 million of the computers.

The Register, 26 July 2006