Indian Minister Hints At GBP 50 Laptop For Teenagers

D. Purandeswari, the minister of State for Higher Education, told an audience at a conference in Delhi that the Indian governement will start selling a USD 100 laptop aimed at "higher education applications".

Unlike previous projects like the doomed Simputer, this laptop project has the full backing of the central government and research is already being carried out t the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras and will be part of a new scheme called 'National Mission in Education through ICT’ according to the initial announcement published here.

The last laptop project which promised a USD 100 price was the XO/OLPC notebook and ended up costing more than twice the announced price.

The Indian governement has been quite reluctant to bag projects like the OLPC saying that giving a laptop to every child was "pedagogically suspect," and could stun budding creative and analytical abilities of the young children.

It is highly unlikely that the Indian government would subsidise the roll out of these laptops and it seems more probable that these laptops would involved private investments.