One laptop per child – is this a joke?

Sufia Tippu
Thursday, 27 July 2006 20:50

IT Industry - Market

Andy Hughes, a sound engineer from Cheltenham, UK, who has been living in India for the past ten years, laughs outright when asked what he thinks about the one laptop per child initiative in the Indian context.

“Where are some of the rural kids going to get electricity from? How are they going to pay for connectivity? Are most parents capable of teaching them how to operate laptops? Who is going to teach them? Why would teachers go that extra mile when they are paid so little? Who is going to service the systems if something goes wrong?” he asks incredulously, shooting one question after another.

Well, that is the reaction from most Indians too when asked about the $100 laptop by the “One Laptop per Child” initiative (OLPC) announced at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunisia, where Professor Nicholas Negroponte, director of Media Lab, MIT and former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan co-presented a prototype in November 2005.

The concept was great like most of Negroponte’s ideas but the fact that it could be even thought of being implemented in India was too far fetched.

But when it was announced that the Human Resources Development (HRD) ministry of the government of India had shot down this idea, I did a double take. The Indian government had actually given this a serious thought and done a significant amount of paperwork on this.

According to the project plan, the central government was to fund the entire project which was $100 per laptop for one million pieces.

The education secretary from the Indian government has sent a letter to his counterpart in the Planning Commission, strongly disapproving the 'One Laptop Per Child' idea and felt that it would be appropriate to utilize the money for universal secondary education in the country.

Armed with multiple reports from the reputed Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, “pedagogical suspicions” raised by National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) and a detailed paper by a senior HRD official who found that the laptop has not even crossed the prototype stage, the Education Secretary had said that OLPC "may actually be detrimental to the growth of creative and analytical abilities of the child".

He had gone on to state that even if the idea was acceptable, “We can't visualise a situation for decades when we can go beyond the pilot stage. We need classrooms and teachers more urgently than fancy tools. If the Planning Commission has the kind of money needed for this scheme, it would be appropriate to utilise it for the universalisation of secondary education for which a concept paper has been laying with the Planning Commission for approval since November 2005, and on which, we also made a presentation."

Says Professor S.Sadagopan, founder director, International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore (IIIT-B): “At this point of time, we need to empower teachers rather than give laptops to students. Another issue that is equally important is that if the government is going to handle the distribution of these laptops (they are still in the prototype stage) and go through a bid and tendering process – we all know how it is going to be. This is especially the case in countries like China and India where the corruption levels are very high.”

Technical issues as to whether the laptop could take the heat and dust as well as rough usage by high school kids, cost of communications and content, figure high on the list of concerns.

According to a Asawari Ghatge, a student at the Mount Carmel College, professors and especially researchers at MIT are far too removed to “feel” the “reality” of India, if not other third world countries.

 “Our parents are literate and they helped us in our homework when we were at school but today most parents of kids in government schools have no clue about computers – who is going to help them out? Another issue is how are they going to connect to the Internet – added costs and added monitoring by parents too are going be major hurdles” she says.

But, there are a few who actually feel that this is a good idea. Says Ali Sait, CEO, PacSoft, a product development firm which specializes in the connected learning community and has implemented IT solutions for student-teacher interactions in over 150 schools right across India, “I think it is a great concept – at least the cost of printing books would come down. And learning becomes a fun thing to do – every child takes to the computer like a duck to water.”

No doubt there is a need to balance teaching and technology but it has to be done in a proper way. “I believe that interaction between the teacher and the student is very important. I do not support the fact that we have to be completely dependent on technology,” says Dr Bruce Robinson, principal of The Sarla Birla Academy which has been set up by one of India’s largest corporate house of Birla.

If we are taking about technology and how it is going to benefit the new generation, we should think about overhauling the education system and making English an integral part of the curriculum. “Look at the difference in kids who are from English medium schools and the vernacular kids – issues like this have to be ironed out rather than thrusting a laptop which would be lost, broken and abused by children.They are curious by nature – how do you tell to do some things and not the others?” asks Hughes.