[OLPC India] Times of India Kolkata edition dated Feb 05, 2009 on page 15

[Saurabh Adhikari]

OLPC rubbishes govt's $10-laptop offer
Sumali Moitra | TNN
Kolkata: Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) has dismissed the government’s much-touted $10 laptop as a “political statement” rather than a display of technological prowess.
“The national elections are suspiciously close and the fiscal year is about to end. At such junctures, what may offer hope against all hopes seems powerfully persuasive,” OLPC India head Satish Jha told TOI on Wednesday.
Jha said that on the basis of what the government has put out through the media, it appeared that it was responding to OLPC’s initiative and “trying to tell the world that what MIT, the world’s premier technological institution could not do in $100, we can do it for a tenth of the cost”.
However, there were many issues that made the government claim appear “suspicious”. “The institutions partnering with the government are virtually within its control. They clearly have no track record of creating any technologies thus far. Product creation is far more complex a process than technology development. None of them has ever developed any product either,” he said.
Jha said none of these institutions, moreover, had ever faced competition and nor had they “claimed to be the hotbeds of creativity either”.
Jha said Negroponte produced a laptop that is “village-proof ” and offers enough computing power to even run Microsoft products. “Moreover, it has built in networking features that allow two laptops to communicate with or without Internet. It’s maintenance free as there are no moving parts,” he added.
Jha said Negroponte brought down the price barrier to $100 as well and then added features that children love — a video camera, a rotating screen, a tablet-like feature and some others that are standard on this laptop. “All these additions doubled the cost but enhanced the learning experience for children,” he pointed out.
“To suggest that the price could not come down because the sales did not materialize is based on ignorance. The price is what it is because it has packed several extra features that cost a lot more and still, five years after the idea was floated, the cost is about $200 and the customs, VAT, octroi, shipping and local transport add $100 to its cost. However, OLPC is a not-for-profit organization and distributes these laptops at cost. Anyone willing to purchase them ex-factory at a batch size of 10,000 is welcome to pick them up for the current cost of production at $210 that may vary as exchange rates fluctuate,” he said.
“As there is zero sales and marketing associated with OLPC’s XO and it is a not-for-profit organization and the laptop is designed to address issues facing the rural areas of the developing world, there is little possibility of anyone producing these laptops even at a matching cost,” he added.
Ends
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