These villagers haven’t the slightest clue that the world is watching them for a verdict on a global initiative but they are enjoying the attention they are getting from neighbouring villages. After all, a village with 23 homes, two refrigerators and no bank or post-office suddenly has something special, powered by laptops, 22 of them, one for each child attending the local primary school.

Khairat, a hamlet of brick and mud homes 80 km from Mumbai, is the first Indian base of Nicholas Negroponte’s worldwide One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. Since October, the 21 students of the Vastishala in Khairat have found a permanent companion in a dinky green-and-white laptop, the ‘XO’. Also called the “$100 laptop” — it actually costs close to $175— the XO is the low-cost tool that OLPC hopes will take computing into the developing world and its classrooms.

“The children don’t even watch TV any more, not even cable TV,” is the verdict of Malu Akhade (30). “They are always glued to their laptops, taking our photographs, recording each other’s voices as they sing and showing us pictures from all over the world.” Akhade can’t read or write but his younger son Rahul, in Class II, has mastered the English alphabet. Akhade has two children in the Vastishala. While Rahul is a master at responding to chat messages instantly — the XOs have longdistance wireless networking capabilities, even without an active Internet connection — Geeta (9) loves to gaze at pictures of the Tundra region and of desert shrubs, so unlike anything in the local geography.

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