Just saw this on /., I must be slow today. And the news is a month old, apparently. Viva la /.!
(I should check my feeds more often..)
Some links:
- The Hindu:
"Rejecting the Planning Commission's idea of implementing 'One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Scheme' as "paedagogically suspect", the HRD Ministry feels it would be appropriate to instead utilise the money for universalization of secondary education."
(more there)
- TOI:
"The HRD ministry has rejected the idea of 'one-laptop-per-child' (OLPC) being aggressively marketed by Nicholas Negroponte of MIT Media Laboratory. "India must not allow itself to be used for experimentation with children in this area," the ministry has said." - Register, Slashdot, Gizmodo, etc.
Info about the OLPC project: the home page, a great talk by Nicholas Negroponte at IT conversations, and how it looks like.
Just links, I am feeling very un-opinionated today. But the HRD's arguments do make sense. I don't think the whole 'detrimental to child development' idea holds a lot of water, but it is true that we need more money spent on building and maintaining schools. There is also suspicion cast at the maturity of Prof. Negroponte's idea. His thoughts are very much inspiring, and not just from the OLPC angle(please listen to his talk linked above if you haven't), and I do hope the idea picks up steam, despite this setback.
Nigeria has ordered a million units, but the delivery will depend on more countries jumping in and pushing the numbers up to 5-10 mil, according to Gizmodo. Makes sense, as the cost is kept that way mostly by the promise of large volumes. I heard there is smalltalk on these things, in which case I weep for the millions of kids who won't get to play with it. Sad sad.
Unrelated: Please read this and leave a comment if you can help. | 
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