[OLPC India] Its official!

[Saurabh Adhikari]

Imphal, Oct 12, 2009: The Chief Minister of Manipur announced today that the state government has decided to embrace One Laptop per Child (OLPC) as its official education strategy.

 

Speaking to newsmen at a public gathering near Imphal the Chief Minister said that the decision was taken after about a year long examination of its merits and the state has ordered 1000 laptops with its internal resources and has asked for another 72,000 laptops under various programs being taken up jointly with the central government.

 

OLPC XOs are the pioneering laptop that have made state of the art education in the face of infrastructural challengees with the help of computers that are designed for learning possible in an affordable and connected way.

 

OLPC claims that these laptops cost less than it takes to simply power up a traditional desktop, does not accept lack of power as a constraint by resorting to options such as solar power, hand crank, foot pedal, cow power or any other source that may work, is moisture proof, dust proof, shock proof and has a non-glare screen that is sun friendly, has zero maintenance and even a child is supposed to be able to repair it and comes with software that are designed for learning as distinct from the traditional laptops that address productivity issues.

 

OLPC India, that started its operations in August 2008, will help the state deploy these laptops as well and has offered them the entire course curriculum along with the laptop for the pilot phase. The content will eventually be developed along the lines demonstrated by OLE, Nepal with modifications advised by the state.

 

It is significant that for the past several years media has widely reported that OLPC had been rejected by the government of India. However, OLPC sources point out that any observations made by the government related to at least a year before the laptop was productionised and were made in absence of any studies or data that could be available only after the laptops had been produced and deployed.

 

OLPC sources estimate that there are about 1.5 Million OLPC laptops already being used by children in over 30 countries and over a million are on back order.

 

For India, its the first statement by a government leader embracing OLPC as its education strategy. OLPC India sources were not available to respond to the queries on this development, however.




Sincerely,

S Adhikari


 		 	   		  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/india/attachments/20091012/d3e9cfa8/attachment.htm