One Laptop Per Child

I have heard a lot of criticism about OLPC. I felt that I must voice my opinion about this. I am speaking about Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop per Child Program. It is natural, to question the wisdom of doing that. What use can a laptop be to a child when there are starving millions??

First let me discuss it from a child's point of view:

I remember a poem by Rabindranath Tagore

Child, how happy you are sitting in the dust,
playing with a broken twig all the morning.
I smile at your play with that little bit of a broken twig.
I am busy with my accounts,
adding up figures by the hour.
Perhaps you glance at me and think,
"What a stupid game to spoil your morning with!"

Child, I have forgotten the art of
being absorbed in sticks and mud-pies.
I seek out costly playthings,
and gather lumps of gold and silver.
With whatever you find you create your glad games,
I spend both my time and my strength over things
I never can obtain.
In my frail canoe I struggle to cross the sea of desire,
and forget that I too am playing a game.

I am fully sure that the child cares no more about the laptop than his broken twig. He hardly cares about the technology or the cost. For the child, the OLPC is nothing more a broken twig.

The specialty of the OLPC is that the teacher can channelize the child's play with a broken twig into a constructive, track-able learning activity. A magic wand that the child can use, to breathe life into its creations. If you have never waved a magic wand... Don't complain!!! It is like blind men arguing about the color of blood.

$100 billion / $200 billion is less than or equal to the market cap of Microsoft or Google. With that amount, every child on this planet could have an OLPC. How much money was squandered in killing innocent people in Iraq? How much money was burnt away this year in the form of crackers across the world... Just for a few moments of joy?? How much money is blown away in interim elections?

The Simputer was a disaster. At least that is what one of my friends who happened to work on some project on the Simputer told me. Coding end user apps for the Simputer was a PITA. At least that is what he said. I never got a chance to try it out and the guy told me not to bother... I had done Gtk coding before... but I also knew I wanted something better than coding in Gtk in C if I was writing an end user application. At least from what I heard, they just reinvented the PDA without the universality. Anyone with a pleasant experinece... I would like to hear from you.

Now they seem to be obsessed with doing that again with OLPC. On the one hand, I love indigenous stuff. Hats off to ISRO for Eg. But there should be some genuine value add. If I want I can call my wristwatch a supercomputer according to some bizarre standard. But can anyone really deliver something like the OLPC at $10? I am skeptical. They will have to bend and twist Moore's law or play jugglery with words.

I don't need a typewriter for the kids. I need a powerful teaching tool. I don't care about the gigahertz. In fact my best used system till date has been a 300 Mhz Cyrix that used while I was in college. It should be able to do what a teacher would want it to do. Not what a salesman can get away with. I know some day Moore's law will give us a $1 laptop. But we need to get some laptops in the field and check out how it works. And we need to do it NOW.

India is an upcoming superpower. Do we really have to make it a "this or that" choice? Why not welcome OLPC with full enthusiasm and push our indigenous ideas too. Good ideas will win in the marketplace. If some one has the capacity to slash prices by 10X everyone benefits. WLL became popular not by discriminating against other telecom options. It just succeeded by its own merit.

We don't need to help our own products by discriminating against OLPC. Let them win by their own merit.

I am glad to hear that OLPC in conjunction with Reliance is doing something in the form of a pilot project in this area. It was interesting to read about the OLPC pilot being conducted in India at Khairat

I'm also excited to hear that SimCity is coming to the OLPC platform. Strategy games are a powerful way to make kids realize how the world works. I have learnt more history from Age of Empires and Ceasar and other games and from History channel than from my textbooks. I learnt a 100 times more about town planning than they would care to teach me. Sometimes I wonder that the situation in bangalore is not as bad as I imagine it is. After all they are able to keep the chaos to at least tolerable levels in spite of having no save game or restart!!! Where demolishing a single building can lead to an out of control situation.

I am a bit annoyed at the continuous increase of the OLPC prices(it has gone to $200 from $100) rather than a decline as one expects from Moore's law. Hope this trend continues only during the initial phases. Hopefully by 2015 we have a $10 laptop. And hope that the $ to Rs conversion becomes Rs 25 per Dollar. That should make it Rs 250 per child. Guess it is too much Wishful thinking ;-). And I am not sure how to apply the law when you have relative changes in currency and the major cost becomes LCD screen cost. And 2015 is not very far away!!!