[OLPC India] India Digest, Vol 23, Issue 11

[K. K. Subramaniam]

On Saturday 01 Nov 2008 10:38:34 am Satish Jha wrote:
> How do banks finance education? It did not exist in the country just a few
> years ago.. Now the banks finance @$50,000 per year for students who can
> get admission overseas.. How did that happen??
Not a good example because it deals with students who have completed basic 
education. Even assuming they did, this scheme will not scale to hundreds of 
millions of children.

> Rs 15,000 can be a huge thing and can be a small thing..
It is way beyond affordability by rural communities. The current per-capita 
income of land-holding farmers in Karnataka is about INR 10,500 [1]. The 
Education Department in Karnataka allocates INR 7,500 per child with INR 450 
going towards learning environment.

[1] http://www.hindu.com/2008/02/01/stories/2008020154340600.htm

> I spoke to the IT minister of another country and suggested they should go
> to IDA and raise funds at low interest rates with a 12 year moratorium.
> They are moving in that direction. Will the Indian education minister or IT
> minister think along those lines?
Primary education interventions are best done at state level due to the large 
variations in language, culture and education infrastructure.

BTW, I would prefer if we can get back to discussing possible deployment 
scenarios rather than broad economics. Because of the huge variations in 
educational infrastructure, aggregation tends to gloss over show stoppers at 
community level.

If we can create threads around specific issues faced by village schools, 
school committees and NGOs and how ICT solved them, then we could make some 
real progress towards building world-class learning environment for every 
child.

Subbu