Now, three months into the pilot project, the children play various games on ‘e-toys’, they play math and alphabet quizzes over chat with the teacher and they use a paint software to practise the Marathi alphabet. “They’ve also learnt that hitting the enter key while using the calci is a shortcut to getting the right answer,” winks Surve. “I’ve to be careful.” The ‘calci’ is the XO calculator, with all the tools a science student in degree college may need.

Suddenly, the schoolroom fills with shrieks of “L for la-yan (lion)”. It’s Mangal Jore (9), who’s just recorded her voice on the laptop. The others follow and 17 different recorded voices are hollering from the XOs’ little speakers. Along with its 1 GB flash memory, the XO also has USB and SD card slots, plus a built-in video camera.

Khairat itself is an unremarkable village, with just two or three families owning cultivable land. Other residents — from the Nomadic Tribes — mostly sell milk or walk four km to Chowk or Karjat to look for work on daily wages. Times are tough, but Khairat’s hardy residents are not insolvent. There are bank accounts maintained in Chowk, television sets in almost all homes, and a few dish antennae too. Every house has one mobile phone, at least. And now, almost each house has a laptop.

Needless to say, all eyes are on this pilot project. There have been some technical niggles though — the server was installed and so was Internet connectivity, all through a CSR participation by Reliance Communication, but the Net has not been working “for a while”. A telephone placed in the school for the Internet connection is dysfunctional too and a few of the laptops are reporting minor technical glitches.

... contd.