India's $10 Laptop Initiative

Nicholas Negroponte first presented the idea of the $100 laptop at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January of 2005. His non-profit organization, One Laptop Per Child, has worked in conjunction with the Media Laboratory at MIT, towards the ideal of making a laptop available to children in developing nations for the price of only $100. The laptops would feature a child-safe exterior design, a Linux operating system, and some kind of human-operated power device to reduce electricity usage (early designs used a hand-crack but those were later discarded as being impractical).

While the $100 laptop may seem like a viable plan to help educate developing nations, India's Ministry of Human Resource Development believes that it's not good enough. They recently rejected the One Laptop Per Child's initiative and withdrew their funding from the project, choosing instead to aim for creating a laptop for a mere one tenth of the previously estimated cost: $10. The HRD's current design (working with the company Semiconductor Complex, a state-sponsored designer and manufacturer of integrated circuits) has been able to lower to cost to $47, with $10 as the ultimate goal. Sources estimate that it will be another two years before these laptops are available.

Tristan Gulliford is a writer, dreamer, and aspiring myth-keeper who makes electronic music under the name "Dreamcode". He is currently attending the University of Colorado at Boulder.