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

[Edward Cherlin]

On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 2:42 PM, Marc Valentin
<mvalentin at oeuvredespains.org> wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 1:06 PM, Satish Jha OLPC <satish at laptop.org> wrote:
>> While I do not agree with nearly any of the observations made below and am
>> witnessing how things can be and are being changed, I would prefer some
>> other members of this group to take it forward.
>
> Satish, there is no point to agree or not, you should acknowledge that
> most of the people of this list have a better understanding of India
> (the real one) than you have.

That seems a strange claim to me. What do you know about Satish's
experience? What is yours?

> Did you ever spend some days living in a
> village among the people ?

I have. Peace Corps, South Korea, 1967, when they were economically
far behind where India is now, and living under a military
dictatorship somewhat like Pakistan's today, with occasional
cross-border attacks from the North. A good friend of my best friend
there died from a grenade tossed on a bus by a failed North Korean
assassination team.

> Do you know what is their budget to live
> (survive) for one month ? Do you know how they live ?

Yes. Subsistence farmers and day laborers made less than a dollar a
day at that time. Peace Corps Volunteers lived fairly comfortably on
about $6/day.

>The XO should be
> seen as what it is : a nice tool. It is not a revolution.

This turns out not to be the case. Unless you think that

o Grameen Phone was not revolutionary in expanding telephone service
from cities only to nearly all of Bangladesh, and attracting several
billion dollars in hard investment money.

o Or that Overstock.com was not certified by the government of
Afghanistan as the largest employer in the country, even with no
physical presence, because tens of thousands of people could sell art
and craft items online, receiving more than 60% of the final selling
price. Sellers did not need to own a computer, but just had to know
somebody who knew somebody who had a computer.

o Or that the ITC e-choupal project has significantly increased farm
income in tens of thousands of villages of India by placing one
computer per village to give them access to the Chicago Board of Trade
soybean prices and other market information, and buy based on world
prices.

o Or that the XO is not revolutionizing education in Peru and
Ethiopia, as stated in published articles and formal studies. See, for
example, http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Academic_papers and
http://radian.org/notebook/astounded-in-arahuay.

And so on through a multitude of other examples.
-- 
Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name
And Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination.
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:Mokurai