Tuesday, February 3rd 2009
India Develops 10 Dollar Laptop for Students
In an attempt to empower millions of students across the country, Indian Government agencies have formulated plans to release a laptop at prices that equal that of a trip to a pizzeria in the west. Under a Government-sponsored scheme that runs parallel to the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) global initiative, the administration sought to implement this scheme to make the computer up to 10 times more affordable than an OLPC. The Government believes that the hidden costs involved in deploying laptops under the OLPC scheme make it still inaccessible to the larger student population, and that much better hardware could be provided at its cost.
The first thing that comes to your mind would probably be the kind of hardware that would make such a cheap laptop. Earliest data trickling in about the specifications indicates each laptop to have about 2 GB of memory, and support wireless networking. We will attempt to find out more about the hardware in the days to come. The Indian Government has reportedly spent close to US $1.5 billion on developing this concept and researching solutions to make this notebook durable and worthy of deployment to the most remote rural areas, that suffer power-outages and voltage fluctuations. Higher Education Secretary R.P. Agrawal said last week that it would be available within six months. The public education scheme governing the deployment of these laptops was flagged off today, in the southern-Indian city of Tirupati. The laptop will be available to students on a priority basis, and will later reach mass-retail channels in the country.
Sources:
Straits Times, The Times of India
The first thing that comes to your mind would probably be the kind of hardware that would make such a cheap laptop. Earliest data trickling in about the specifications indicates each laptop to have about 2 GB of memory, and support wireless networking. We will attempt to find out more about the hardware in the days to come. The Indian Government has reportedly spent close to US $1.5 billion on developing this concept and researching solutions to make this notebook durable and worthy of deployment to the most remote rural areas, that suffer power-outages and voltage fluctuations. Higher Education Secretary R.P. Agrawal said last week that it would be available within six months. The public education scheme governing the deployment of these laptops was flagged off today, in the southern-Indian city of Tirupati. The laptop will be available to students on a priority basis, and will later reach mass-retail channels in the country.
33 Comments on India Develops 10 Dollar Laptop for Students
but no way you can get wireless or 2 gb of anything for that price
Sound like anything like that will happen here? Maybe!
Kei
Along with this I would like to see India spend on hosting large digital text book section, so people who can't afford but have this laptop can download and get benefit out of it. I know government sponsors text books etc, but still there are certain books that you must absolutely buy in order to take up the exams properly, like 'Konar Notes' (not exactly the same but something similar).
Anyway, I think they might be a hook up the laptop up to a main Host when in schools. Think about it, if the laptop is connected to a host computer, that host can hold all the files etc. The laptops would not need to have a mass of Hard drive memory. A small lightweight variant of Linux and notepad... i could see this happening.
India has gone crazy.* Laptop for kids? there are more than pressing issues than this bs.
*along with those OLPC people.
Or the other bit?
And what other pressing issue... like education in IT. A thing that nearly every one in the world now needs to get a job?
Besides, why do students NEED laptops, in India.......?