International   

Computers a hit in a remote village

ARAHUAY (Peru): Doubts about whether poor, rural children really can benefit from quirky little computers evaporate as quickly as the morning dew in this hilltop Andean village, where 50 primary school children got machines from the One Laptop Per Child project six months ago.

These offspring of peasant families whose monthly earnings rarely exceed the cost of one of the $188 laptops — people who can ill afford pencil and paper much less books — can’t get enough of their “XO” laptops.

At breakfast, they’re already powering up the combination library/videocam/audio recorder/music maker/drawing kits. At night, they’re dozing off in front of them .

“It’s really the kind of conditions that we designed for,” Walter Bender, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff programme One Laptop Per Child, said of this agrarian backwater up a precarious dirt road.

Founded in 2005 by the former MIT Media Lab director, Nicholas Negroponte, One Laptop has retreated from early boasts that developing-world governments would snap up millions of the pint-sized laptops at $100 each. In a backhanded tribute, One Laptop now faces homegrown competitors everywhere from Brazil to India — and a full-court press from Intel Corp.’s more power-hungry Classmate.

But no competitor approaches the XO in innovation. It is hard drive-free, runs on the Linux operating system and stretches wireless networks with “mesh” technology that lets each computer in a village relay data to the others. Mass production began last month and Mr. Negroponte says he expects at least 1.5 million machines to be sold by next November. Even that would be far less than Mr. Negroponte originally envisioned. The higher-than-initially-advertised price and a lack of the Windows operating system, still being tested for the XO, have dissuaded many potential government buyers.

Mr. Negroponte said 1,50,000 more laptops would get shipped to countries including Rwanda, Mongolia, Haiti, and Afghanistan in early 2008 through “Give One, Get One,” a U.S.-based promotion ending December 31 in which you buy a pair of laptops for $399 and donate one or both. The children of Arahuay prove One Laptop’s transformative conceit: that you can revolutionise education and democratise the internet by giving a simple, durable, power-stingy but feature-packed laptop to the worlds’ poorest kids. Critics of the rollout have two key concerns. The first is the ability of teachers — poorly trained and equipped — to cope with profoundly disruptive technology.

Mr. Becerra said the government is offering $150 grants to qualifying teachers toward the purchase of conventional laptops. The second big concern is maintenance. “What you want is for the kids to do the repairs,” said Mr. Negroponte, who believes such tinkering is itself a valuable lesson.

“I think the kids can repair 95 per cent of the laptops.” — AP

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section

Computers a hit in a remote village
Thaksin not to seek office
12 die in Nepal bridge collapse, many missing
Missing statues: Bangladesh seeks Interpol probe
Journalists’ detention criticised
Hu’s appeal to non-Communist parties, businessmen
Further slide in Brown’s popularity
Putin wants to track his dog
Vatican art collection
Haneef hopes Australia will compensate him

Copyright © 2007, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu