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Laptops to reach out

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Sreelatha Menon New Delhi
Last Updated : Feb 26 2013 | 12:24 AM IST
Nothing can be as pleasant as day dreaming. Cervantes spun a classic out of it. But the Government of India is one of the last places one would expect to find Quixotic souls, that too, with a bleeding heart.
 
Least of all the Ministry of Human Resources Development, that mammoth saddled with aloof bureaucrats, scheming things apparently for the good of education in the country, even as the Government continues to quietly pass its education bills to the public, through an education cess for example.
 
But it turns out that some bureaucrats have been, well, dreaming. Of a country where the littlest child in a remote tribal village can read and write, and dream of conquering the world.
 
The dream is to make learning completely digitalised, to make it accessible even to the illiterate. Narendra Kumar Sinha a bureaucrat, a joint secretary to be specific, is the passionate promoter of Sakshat as this initiative is called.
 
He calls it a campaign to reach out to the have-nots. That the programme begins with the last man in the country, the man, woman and child who live in hamlets cut off from the world, from schools, hospitals, from public transport. And electricity.
 
The website, sakshat.ac.in, launched a few months ago, seeks to reach out to them and take education and knowledge to them through a tap on the key board, in their own local language. The website is for the literate. There are Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) teachers dedicated to providing answers to any query concerning textbooks, their voices can be heard and faces seen.
 
The goal is to have a learning station for even the illiterate, as well as for villages with no schools, no teachers. Sinha's faith in the scheme is touching. He says that even a farm labourer can manoeuvre the TV remote. So why not tap a key on the laptop?
 
Laptops? Yes his scheme will reach the villages through laptops the ministry plans to provide "every village home". The Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai and the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore have been given the task of developing laptops worth Rs 450 each. This raises questions among many as to how can lap tops be given to children who have been denied even a satchel or a school.
 
Sinha does not flinch from saying everyone has a right to a computer and net linkage. Laptops would be given free to the poor , he says.
 
The Indian Institute of Science, the IITs and a private company have accepted the challenge to develop and design a chip. "The material is just 10 rupee bits of plastic. It is the chip that commands the price," says Sinha.
 
Many smell a scandal here. Others feel it is like offering cakes where there is no bread. Well if cakes are being offered and if they are not poisoned, maybe the poor would not mind a bite too.
 
Sinha feels this could ultimately help the government reach out to the unreached. It is a technology that has to be used to get past the stretches of unmotorable countryside, to the last man in the country.
 
The laptops will come in three years or the moment the chip is designed indigenously. Power wont be a problem . A 2 watt battery will last ten hours, he says.
 
The MIT had offered laptops for $150 or Rs 7,500 each which the ministry had rejected last year. Sinha is hopeful that the Indian chip will come and he mentally calculates the price for 10 crore laptops: Rs 5,000 crore.
 
He is talking to NGOs and the national literacy mission to plan out the e-literacy campaign. With Sinha's faith in the e-literacy project, nay movement as he calls it, even a cynic feels proselitised. Seems like a cake walk.

 
 

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First Published: Feb 11 2007 | 12:00 AM IST

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