In this Maharashtra village, one laptop per child opens many windows to world

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.

Surve was one of the reasons for picking Khairat, says Bhalchandra Joshi, who is heading the project from Reliance Communications, which is partnering with OLPC as a CSR initiative. “We roamed around and saw nearly 25 different villages and schools, from Talegaon to Vasai to Ambarnath,” says Joshi. Some civic and government schools were approached too, but the response was lukewarm.

“It had to be rural in the true sense but also somewhere that our engineers could reach quickly. Khairat fit our criteria perfectly. And Surve is so passionate about his job, the fact that he knows how to use computers makes it easier for us,” he adds. Also, at 30-odd km from the Navi Mumbai headquarters of the Reliance ADA Group, the location was ideal.

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