`Mobiles no substitute for laptops`

Q & A: Nicholas Negroponte

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project has not caught on well in India's developing economy. Particularly so when low-cost computing is considered to be one of the key initiatives for bridging the educational hurdles in the country. MIT Professor Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder of OLPC, is now looking at a collaboration with the private sector in India. Negroponte spoke to Shivani Shinde on some of the issues that hampered it growth in India.

The $100 laptop currently retails at $195. Is there any chance of the price coming down?

A reduction in price would be possible only if a subsidy were provided. Assembling the laptops locally (India) is not possible. Of the total manufacturing and marketing cost, about $1.50 goes towards assembling. Shifting that work to India will only increase this cost to $20. The way we have set up the manufacturing unit currently is such that it reduces such costs. At present, the economics is not to get it to India. 

You have had success in some countries. How do you gauge the project's success in India?

Success comes in many flavours. Like in one of the schools using XO, we found that in the second year, the number of student enrollments went up by 100 per cent.

India and China have the size factor in common. Both the countries have a sense that the domestic market is so big that they do not feel the need to collaborate on this unlike countries such as Uruguay, Peru, Rwanda and Mongolia. Hence, India and China have been harder for us but I won't write them out as failures.

What might change in India is our collaboration with private companies for distribution. We have been talking to Reliance Communications. This is a new chapter and I have to say we will explore this openly with others. Up until now, we were dealing with the government alone.

In countries like India and China, mobile penetration has surpassed PCs. Do you still see laptops as the means of going ahead in India?

One has to look at the form factor and the mobile is not appropriate for reading, reflection or even serious emails. Some people think that they can go home and connect to TV sets but then most of the people do not have TV sets. One should look at it for helping connectivity but mobile phones cannot be the answer for education.

Intel is far behind. What happens is that they confuse the market. As they are not interested in the same people as we are. They are interested in urban areas, older kids and people who can pay and buy laptops and not in rural areas and poor children. So, what happens is that instead of collaboration, the forces become divergent.