OLPIC - One Laptop per Indian Child. Has a nice ring to it

In the early days of the OLPC proposal, the Human Resources and Development Ministry in India had declined participation in the OLPC project. Their reasons were related to suspect pedagogy, lack of interest, and appropriate use of funds. Here's an excerpt from an article on the Register:

The Indian Ministry of Education dismissed the laptop as "pedagogically suspect". Education Secretary Sudeep Banerjee said: "We cannot visualise a situation for decades when we can go beyone the pilot stage. We need classrooms and teachers more urgently than fancy tools."

Banerjee said if money were available it would be better spent on existing education plans.

Banerjee told the Hindu: "We do not think that the idea of Prof Negroponte is mature enough to be taken seriously at this stage and no major country is presently following this. Even inside America, there is not much enthusiasm about this."

All this is done and somewhat forgotten, but India is a huge market. The number of children who can use such technology (and eventually education) is very high. Remember, the success of this project is dependent on economies of scale. With a population over 1.1 billion, economies will scale very well. But it looks like not all is lost. It seems that there was a mixed reaction to the presentation that Negroponté did to the Ministry back in 2006. A Times of India article says:

Negroponte had made a presentation on OLPC at Yojna Bhavan on April 7 seeking to sell one million laptops at the rate of $100 per unit for children, the cost to be borne by the government. The idea has enough takers in the Plan panel. And despite HRD's strong disapproval, Negroponte is coming to Delhi again on July 3 to hardsell his version of digital empowerment.

HRD contends that spending Rs 450 crore on digital empowerment can be better spent on primary and secondary education. "It is quite obvious that the financial expenditure to be made on the scheme will be out of public funds. It would be impossible to justify an expenditure of this scale on a debatable scheme when public funds continue to be in inadequate supply for well-established needs listed in different policy documents," the ministry said.

If the government isn't interested and the market holds a huge potential, one way around this quagmire is to seek private investment. Along with purchasing a million laptops, the sponsoring entity will also have to worry about distribution, infrastructure, content and education. On the OLPC wiki site, the India page has some information on the formation of a foundation. This foundation is a mix of various interested parties. From the wiki:

The formation of OLPC-India Foundation has been engineered, which comprises of corporate partners, non-profit organizations, Education Ministers at State Level, bureaucrats, and most importantly: interested volunteers.

Well, it looks like things have been brewing behind the scenes. There is a small pilot going on in a village called Khairat, near the town of Karjat in Maharashtra (Karjat figures big with Indian Railways, but I digress). The pilot is being sponsored by the Reliance Group, more specifically the newly formed division of Reliance - the Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group. Reliance is big. They run plenty of fiber optic and cellular capabilities, and would be ideal for the infrastructure. Their involvement in the actual education project is a wait-and-see game in my opinion. 

Some details on the OLPC + Reliance alliance are at http://himachal.us/2007/10/12/reliance-group-announce-cooperation-for-one-laptop-per-child-foundation/3259/business/csharma 

Khairat school looks like a small pilot. Details about the Khairat pilot project are at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Khairat_school Hopefully, more pilots will follow. I sure hope that at some point, the project will reach my village of Bhagmalpur in North India.