India Rejects $100 One Laptop Per Child Project

By agencies   |   Thursday, 27 July 2006, 19:30 IST
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NEW DELHI: India has rejected Prof. Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child scheme - 1 million of the OLPC laptops, which aims to provide kids in developing countries with a simple $100 machine. The Indian Ministry of Education dismissed the laptop as "paedagogically suspect". Education Secretary Sudeep Banerjee said: "We cannot visualize a situation for decades when we can go beyond the pilot stage. We need classrooms and teachers more urgently than fancy tools." "We think that the idea of Prof. Negroponte is not mature enough to be taken seriously and no major country is enthusiastic about it. Even inside America, there is not much confidence about it," Banerjee added. OLPC's original schedule was to deliver machines by the end of 2006, but it will not start production until it has received orders, and payment, for between five and ten million machines. In addition to Nigeria other countries such as China, India, Brazil, Argentina, Egypt, and Thailand were all named by the OLPC organization as governments, which had expressed an interest.