Ranjith’s Castle

Cheaper Laptops on the Way - Hats off to Indian Engineers!!

July 22, 2007 at 12:22 am · Posted On Technology

One Laptop per Child [OLPC] is a project run by a non-profit organization in Delware, US for the creation of Laptop for $100. This is around 8 to 10 times cheaper than the current price. This project is mostly aimed at creation of minimized laptops for usage in schools across the world. This will be mostly out by the year 2008. When this is released, they also feel that the powerful official usage laptops will come down to $500. There are a lot of companies and countries taking part in this project with an objective to empower children. The softwares to be used are mostly OpenSource once and some free stuffs donated by different organizations.

I was little unhappy when India’s name is not in the list of countries sponsoring it. But was quite happy when I read the wiki completely.

The Human Resource Development (HRD) Ministry of India has rejected Nicholas Negroponte’s offer of $100 laptops for schoolchildren. The Ministry is planning to make laptops at $10 for schoolchildren. The two designs submitted to the ministry from a final year engineering student of Vellore Institute of Technology and a researcher from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore; have come to an estimated production cost of $47 per laptop, but they expect the price to become lower when volumes rise. No technical specifications have been released.

Hats off to the Guys of VIT and IISE.

Read the article on times of India

Cheers - Ranjith

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