Technology
One Laptop Per Child - Not in India
And thank god too!
I usually avoid repeating news found elsewhere, but this one is important. India has refused to be part of the suspect “One Laptop Per Child” (OLPC) project of Negroponte and MIT Labs.
News of this came to me from the blogosphere, and I have seen two reasons for India’s rejection.
- The World Bank’s PSD Blog says the Indian Ministry of Education dismissed the laptop as “pedagogically suspect.” Education Secretary Sudeep Banerjee said: “We cannot visualise a situation for decades when we can go beyond the pilot stage. We need classrooms and teachers more urgently than fancy tools.”‘
- The Indian Economy Blog says the Indian HRD Ministry explained that according to some American psychologist “any sustained use of computers may lead to a disembodied brain and bring about isolationist tendencies in social behaviour.â€
As Atanu Dey points out, the psychological reasoning is wrong. The pedagogy behind it, however, is certainly suspect. Regardless, the project is egregious at best, transfering scarce funds to a project cooked up by the digital-haves to tell the have-nots what was wrong with them and how to fix it.
Atanu Dey calls it a Formula for Milking the Digital Divide - a must read if you know anything about OLPC.
Beyond the problem of opportunity cost pointed out by Atanu Dey, I believe it is based on the wrong idea - that lack of technology (or the digital divide) is a problem.
As an ex-software engineer I know how engineers work - they are excited by a technical challenge and immerse themselves in it. The desire to innovate can be so strong that questioning the project is unthinkable and the work sustains itself purely on the beliefs of those who do it. What gets lost in the process, unfortunately, is the big picture, and the understanding that technology is only a means to an end - one that can often be achieved in other, simpler ways. I get the same feeling about the OLPC.
Technology exists not for itself, but in order to empower and enable. The reason mobile phones are so popular in the developing world is because they do that well. What is the OLPC supposed to enable that cannot be achieved otherwise, and cheaper?
Update: Another reason, reported by ZDNet UK, is that Negroponte is ‘persona non grata’ in India after the failure of MIT Media Labs Asia, which he had helped setup. Thanks to wayan at OLPC News for pointing this out (comment below).
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6 comments for “One Laptop Per Child - Not in India”
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Well, India has got a huge reserve of ‘pending projects’ already. Why increase the amount of that?
Once in a while, there comes a wise decision made by the GOI and I see this one certainly as that and welcome it. Interesting reasons have been provided for the decision, so allow me to add another one to support the course taken. I call it the concept of Appropriate Technology.
The term as it is was coined by legendary (albeit criticized in the mainstream) economist E.F Schumacher in his book ‘Small is Beautiful’. The fundamental idea is simple: Any technology can have both intended and unintended consequences of its use by humankind, for the technology does not exist in a void but within a social, economic, and cultural context. It is this context that makes the technology successful or unsuccessful and therefore should be carefully considered before introducing a new technology, like a laptop. Only by ensuring that technology is “appropriate” to its context can one maximize its intended benefits and minimize unintended repercussions. Despite the so called ongoing “progress”, India as a population and society is at a different stage of socio-economic evolution than the societies in the West. Any technology oriented solutions will have to keep this idea into consideration if they are to solve a problem rather than introduce new ones. Not to say that computers are bad, but they have to introduced in a “controlled” manner in order for them to be successful. One such successful example is the eChaupal project launched by ITC - that provides technology to farmers in a way that is carefully controlled. OLPC is a good example of an “inappropriate” technology. While we mark the 25th anniversary of the PC, it will be several decades before mankind fully understands the effects of staring at a CRT on the development of a human mind.
And there are other reasons for India’s rejection of the OLPC program. Mainly the very poor showing of the MIT Media Lab Asia which destroyed MIT’s credibility with the Indian government. http://www.olpcnews.com/sales_talk/countries/india_rejection_back.html
[…] In choosing not to join the loud debate on Technology for Development I’ve held that technology for its own sake is useless, a view often ignored especially by western commentators, with the OLPC a perfect example. In the context of development, what is useful about technology is not what it is but rather what it can do. […]
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