The following e-mail will be sent on your behalf.

<your name> has sent the following story to you from ElectricNews.net.

The story is available from http://www.electricnews.net/article/9750083.html

India rejects One Laptop Per Child
Wednesday, July 26 2006
by denise cox


India has decided against getting involved in Nicholas
Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child scheme which aims to
provide kids in developing countries with a simple USD100
machine.



The success of the (OLPC) project depends on support, and big
orders, from governments. The loss of such a potentially huge
and relatively technically sophisticated market will be a
serious blow.





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 beyond 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."



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.



But in better news it also emerged earlier this month that
Nigeria is ordering one million machines.



The idea is backed by AMD, Google, MIT, Nortel and Red Hat.



China, India, Brazil, Argentina, Egypt, Nigeria, and Thailand
were all named by the OLPC organisation as governments which
had expressed an interest.





The Register
and its contents are copyright 2006 Situation Publishing.
Reprinted with permission.