India Rejects Laptops for Children
India has decided that allowing its children to accept a $100 laptop each in the “one-laptop-per-child” (OLPC) initiative would make them guinea pigs. Classrooms and teachers are needed more urgently than laptops, Education Secretary Sudeep Banerjee said. The Indian Education Secretary also didn’t believe the OLPC had much support in other countries although Nigeria is ordering one million machines and the project is supported by a number of influential companies including Google.
I’d have to agree that priorities in developing countries must be different given their limited resources. Something’s gotta give. If $100 could provide food, shelter, and basic supplies for a year, wouldn’t that be more important than giving them a laptop? On the other hand, if laptops come loaded with software and books (they all come with wifi and peer-to-peer capabilities), that would be a tremendous resource.
In some ways, this is the same dilemma I have when giving gifts. I like to give something useful and practical but then I wonder if gifts should be a little extravagant, something the recipient would never splurge on. Many times, I give gift certificates and let people choose for themselves.
Would giving children and their families a choice be a better solution? Some families may need basic supplies more than a laptop while others are able to survive day-to-day but are unable to afford extras.
What do you think?
via Slashdot
The Register, July 26, 2006
Technorati Tags: one laptop per child, olpc, laptops, children, kids, computers, india
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POSTED IN: News and Links about Children's Things
10 opinions for India Rejects Laptops for Children
Kerri Aldrich
Jul 28, 2006 at 1:17 pm
I agree that gifts, if they’re intended to better the life of the recipient, should be what the people really need. Of course, if there are really big money companies involved (haven’t checked the links to the story yet!), it probably wouldn’t hurt them too badly to try and help with both the necessary and the extras.
Samat Jain
Jul 29, 2006 at 12:14 am
I’ve made some India’s rejection of the $100 laptop on my weblog.
The $100 laptop is meant to be a tool, no different than a textbook or a pencil. A better textbook or a pencil. Having families decide whether they want they want the $100 laptop is like asking whether they want their children to have a better education or not.
Hsien-Hsien Lei
Jul 29, 2006 at 8:45 am
Kerri: I suppose my comparison of birthday gifts vs laptops is a little bit off. :P Over at Samat’s blog, I came up with the idea of businesses and individuals buying the laptops for kids and letting the government pay for basics.
Samat: Thanks for the comment. I’ve commented at yours too. The trouble is that money isn’t unlimited so difficult choices have to be made.
Samat Jain
Jul 29, 2006 at 11:45 am
Made a reply to your comment on my site, which I’m posting here:
I’m not sure whether the elite rich and businesses would foot the bill; if India’s rich are anything like those in the United States, they tend to not help the poor unless they are involved in something like a disaster.
The point I don’t think I made clear in my original blog post with the $100 laptop being a tool: the monies spent on classrooms and teachers are not the same as those spent on supplies. If more money was spent on classrooms and teachers, would they not buy textbooks for that year?
There are a lot of people who don’t have something to eat and a place to sleep, but there are even more who do. The lower middle-class is huge, often-forgotten part of society, who just don’t have the money to purchase a normal PC. And if they did, what would they do with it?
A thing that a lot of press ignores about the OLPC $100 laptop is that it’s not just hardware, it’s content and software as well, a complete electronic learning platform–this is not stuff you’d get without spending thousands of dollars or a huge amount of time if you just went down to your local compuer store. The OLPC $100 laptop could be considered more a “gadget,” it’s designed to perform a specific task and run specific software very well. It’s not meant to be used the same way as conventional laptops in industrialized countries use them, which is probably why industrialized countries at this point are not a target for the device.
Hsien-Hsien Lei
Jul 29, 2006 at 12:00 pm
Samat: Thanks for coming back and telling us more about the OLPC laptop. I admit to not having read all of the information available on it. If I had an unlimited budget, you can bet that I’d be buying laptops for every child and adult I know.
Kailani
Jul 31, 2006 at 2:49 pm
When I purchase gifts for kids, I usually look at the family first. If it’s for a family who I know is struggling, then I try to get something more practical and useful. Practical can also be fun, too!
Here via Carnival of Family Life.
Hsien-Hsien Lei
Aug 1, 2006 at 1:45 pm
Kailani: Anything new is generally fun! ;)
wayan
Aug 10, 2006 at 10:55 pm
I say there is more to the India rejection backstory than told in the news. One angle: MIT Media Lab Asia was such a disaster that India doesn’t trust MIT anymore: http://www.olpcnews.com/sales_talk/countries/india_rejection_back.html
Hsien-Hsien Lei
Aug 12, 2006 at 7:46 am
wayan: Ooooh. Scandal. Thanks for the link!
Alok Kadam
Mar 28, 2007 at 3:46 am
Well, Let’s just be a little more frank and try and make sense of this OLPC thing when it comes to India. Firstly, Don’t we require English to use a computer? That’s the first hurdle, Secondly don’t we require it to be mandatory for all kids to go to school. And thirdly for a country in which a family would rather send their kids to earn a daily wage don’t you think a laptop would just be a resource to be traded in and money mispent is a waste….. Which countries which have solved the first three problems are more than welcome to Enroll under the OLPC but as far as India is concerned, no prejudices but we can’t afford to send a mason to the moon in a shuttle worth over a billion dollars ….. the try would be futile….. unless the Indian corporates really want the MNC’s to bag more money and fill their own vaults with more cash.
Sorry to be such a pessimist but the fact still lies, I’m Indian and I’ve learnt it the hard way , people no doubt colorful and plenty but equally irrisponsible and illeterate (Intellectually) so it’s wouldn’t be the wisest thing for india to really get into stuff like this till it doesn’t solve the three basic problems… luckily the education ministry does have sane people running it, irrelevant of whether the MNC’s weren’t able to buy them off or they sincerely declined on logical chain of thought to decline or reject the OLPC thing. I guess it was a wise decision.
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