Monday, February 02, 2009

$10-LAPTOP INDIA’S ANSWER TO MIT MODEL WORTH $100

Akshaya Mukul, New Delhi, February 1, 2009
The Times of India (Bangalore edition)

A $10 laptop (Rs 500) prototype, with 2 GB RAM capacity, would be on display in Tirupati on February 3 when the National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology is launched.

The $10-laptop project, first reported in TOI three years ago, has come as an answer to the $100 laptop of MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte that he was trying to hard sell to India. The $10 laptop has come out of the drawing board stage due to work put in by students of the Vellore Institute of Technology, scientists in the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, IIT-Madras and involvement of PSUs like Semiconductor Complex. “At this stage, the price is working out to be $20 but with mass production it is bound to come down,” R P Agarwal, secretary, higher education said.

Apart from questioning the technology of $100 laptops, the main reason for HRD ministry’s resistance to Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project was the high and the hidden cost that worked out to be $200. The mission launch would also see demonstration of e-classroom, virtual laboratory and a better ‘Sakshat’ portal that was launched more than two years ago.

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