One Laptop a Child (OLC) for USD 100 -India to do better

In one of my earlier posts , I had talked about my bias about discovery based learning for school children . According to me the malaise of our education system is the overemphasis on rote learning to the extent that constructivist/discovery learning is completely ignored . However the question was how do we implement discovery learning across a country like ours . In another post I had also mentioned about technology based applications for learning and the presence of technology based classrooms in rural Karnataka , but it did not seem to be a scalable model . In the absence of a plan , I would assume that it would be interesting to implement the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project which is being led by Nicholas Negraponte of MIT Ad Labs .

The One Laptop per Child association (OLPC) is a not for profit organization set up to oversee The Children's Machine project and the construction of the XO-1 "$100 laptop". The objectives of the OLPC is to facilitate learning in developing countries and to provide a children's machine at approximately USD 100 . Wikipedia has documented the details of the project including the hardware of the machine . As per plan the laptops will be sold to governments of developing countries and distributed through the respective ministries of education willing to adopt the policy of one laptop per child . At this point in time 13 countries (including Pakistan) have committed to the project in various ways , India does not feature in the list and the reason being that our HRD Ministry believes that it can manufacture the same laptop for US 10 . Considering the fact that as a nation our capabilities in computer hardware manufacture is quite limited , I fail to understand how the HRD Minstry is planning to execute the project at this price . According to me the OLPC is a great way to kick start the process of technology enabled education at a grass root level and hopefully the myopia of Arjun Singh will not come in the way of making use of global synergies (ie the OLPC laptops ..).... lets see when the USD 10 laptop of the Minstry of HRD takes off , if at all .....or is this another missed opportunity !!!