Despite the instinctive appeal of distributing laptops to schoolchildren, there is precious little evidence that making computers available to children improves educational outcomes. The circumstantial evidence that exists certainly doesn’t buttress the one-laptop-per-child approach.
. . .
Two other recent studies conducted in the developing world are even more telling. Economists Ofer Malamud and Cristian Pop-Eleches studied a program in Romania that distributed discount vouchers for the purchase of home computers to low-income families. When they compared the families that used the vouchers to acquire computers with families that were just above the income cut-off to receive the vouchers, they found that computers had a negative effect on students’ grades and educational goals. Leigh Linden, an economist at Columbia University, and Felipe Barrera-Osorio of The World Bank studied a program in Colombia that increased the number of computers in schools and provided curriculum support and training for teachers — and found no impact on student outcomes. “In this case, despite the curriculum support, it was clear that the teachers simply weren’t using the computers,” Linden says.

Linden also led one of the few experimental studies to show a positive impact from the use of computers — a project in India that provided computers and education software to schools and randomly assigned some schools to use the software during school hours and others to encourage computer use after hours. This study found that using computers during school hours —essentially substituting computers for teachers — actually hurt learning, while using them after hours as a supplement to traditional classroom teaching had dramatic positive effects on the weakest students. Even this outcome doesn’t really support the OLPC mission, though; the software evaluated is very much in the “drill and practice” model that Negroponte has explicitly derided.

Ogden further on in the article mentions a few more effective means of improving educational outcomes.

There are a number of simple, cheap programs that have been proven successful at getting children in developing countries into school and helping them learn more while they are there.

The simplest and least costly of these programs is deworming. Nearly 2 billion people around the world are affected by parasitic worm infections, with children disproportionately affected. While each variety of parasitic worm affects a person differently, they all take a substantial toll on growth, energy and attention, with entirely predictable impacts on school attendance and learning. Harvard economist Michael Kremer has studied the impact of mass deworming in Kenya and India. Delivering deworming medication costs 50 cents per child per year in Kenya but yielded a 25 percent increase in school attendance; a similar program in India cost $4 per student per year and yielded a 20 percent attendance gain. “This is a simple, cost-effective and yet tragically not-done program. It’s a scandal that [deworming] hasn’t been addressed,” Kremer says. There are spillover effects as well. “The most surprising thing about the study in Kenya was the widespread impact,” Kremer says. The program drove down infection rates for several kilometers around the schools, he says, and there were significant improvements in attendance for untreated students, in the treatment schools as well as in nearby schools not in the program.

Go read it all.

Related Posts: Aside from the posts in the category OLPC, you may wish to see –

The OLPC is Inappropriate for India. (May 2009)

Formula for Milking the Digital Divide. (Nov 2005)

Although I have only briefly handled an XO, the laptop from One Laptop Per Child, I have read enough reviews about the device to be fully convinced about the innovative computer that it is. Knowledgeable technical experts have expressed almost unreserved admiration for the XO and the innovative technologies it embodies. It is hard not to be impressed by the little green machine.

XO is Great, OLPC for India is Not

How could it be otherwise? Considering that some of the most technically brilliant people have worked on developing it – often coming up with truly innovative technical breakthroughs. Without a doubt, the XO has rewritten the rules of the game and indeed radically changed the way that laptops will be designed.

Its influence can already be seen in the success of netbooks in the developed markets. The chief evangelist and creator of the idea, Professor Nicholas Negroponte, can be justifiably proud of the OLPC program and what it has done–and undoubtedly will do more.

I have had the privilege of expressing my admiration for the OLPC XO in person to Prof Negroponte when I saw him at the launch of the OLPC India project in Mumbai last year.

All this may make me appear inconsistent since I have written dozens of posts about the XO on my blog since 2005 arguing that the OLPC project is absolutely the last thing that India needs. My position has actually been quite consistent.

The essential point is that even though something is technically marvellous does not imply that it is appropriate for a specific purpose or under special circumstances. My argument has been that the XO is inappropriate for India. It would be a mistake for the India to spend its limited public funds available for education in buying the XO laptop.

Educational Failure in India

It is worthwhile to recount the ground reality in India. First, the numbers: the school-going cohort is around 200 million strong. India has around a million schools, a few thousand colleges and universities. Over 90 percent of children drop out of school by the 12th grade. Public spending in education is in the low single-digit percentages.

A depressingly large percentage of schools are so cash-strapped that they don’t even have a blackboard, to say nothing about any other facilities normally associated with schools. Of the little of financial resources available, a good proportion of it is wasted due to negligence and misappropriations.

The Indian education system is an unmitigated failure, especially for the children of the poor. Higher education does not fare much better but the much celebrated successes of a few who graduate from a handful of elite technical institutions superficially masks that failure.

Its Not a Technical Problem

There are well-known reasons for why the Indian education system is a failure but they will not detain us here. What is relevant is that none of factors have anything to do with technology. It is not a technical problem that leads to the dysfunctional system. So technology cannot be part of the fix that the system needs.

This is not to say that technology will not have a role to play once the system has been fixed, but only that it needs the non-technology related interventions before technology can have any effect on it.

It is a matter of sequencing. First get rid of the obvious faults of the system, taking care that the intervention is appropriate to the problem. For example, an administrative problem requires an administrative solution, not a technical or a medical solution.

One of my primary arguments against the OLPC program in India is that it is out of sequence in the sense that there are other more pressing important problems with the education system, which not only will not be helped by technology, but indeed that the diversion of resources to the OLPC will exacerbate the existing problems.

OLPC is Too Expensive

One fact needs to be placed front and center about the Indian educational system: it is financial resource constrained. Sure, human resources are nothing to write home about either but at its base it is lack of money. India cannot afford the OLPC. Let’s do the numbers.

Roughly 100 million children cannot afford to buy a laptop, regardless of whether it costs $400 (a well-equipped Dell) or $200 (the XO). This is somewhat like I cannot afford to buy a Rolls Royce, regardless of whether it costs $600K or half of that. It is outside my budget.

The base cost of XOs for 100 million children works out to be approximately $20 billion. That does not include recurring cost of use and ownership, such as replacement, repair, and support. That could add at least 20 percent more, or $4 billion recurring per year. That’s more than the entire public budget for education in India.

Spending a fraction of that will not do because then only a fraction of children will get the XO, which will be a disaster in terms of privileging some at the expense of the others. It may bridge the much talked about ‘digital divide’ for some but leave the rest worse off because they will not get even what little they were getting before. It is like feeding some cake and starving the rest, instead of distributing plain bread to all.

There are many other reasons for why I don’t support the OLPC program for India which can be explored later. For now, the bottom line is that it is too expensive. There are more affordable solutions for India – such as making good books inexpensively available and funding students (as opposed to funding schools.)

Netbooks Will Have to Wait

In summary, the OLPC XO can perhaps be useful in some middle-income and most high-income countries. But for a low-income country like India, we have to continue to look for something more appropriate such as blackboards, books, and paper notebooks. The netbooks will have to wait.

What’s worse than a $10 laptop that winds up costing $30? A $10 $30 laptop that’s not really a laptop at all. India is shrugging off the disappointment surrounding its apparent failure to bring home-grown tech to its youth, but thankfully isn’t giving up on the kids, ordering a whopping 250,000 OLPC XO laptops. Waiting this long to drink the Negroponte Kool Aid means 1,500 schools will get the latest and greatest models, featuring VIA C7-M processors and bumped up storage. The plan is for a total of three million portable computers for Indian schools this year, and while it’s unclear just how many will be little, green, and different, that’s a whole lot of lappys regardless. [Emphasis added.]

I thought that India was done with that OLPC insanity bit. I was wrong. The sheer stupidity of those who make these decisions never ceases to amaze. Or perhaps it is not stupidity but cynical manipulation of the system by power-hungry politicians using public funds to give away goodies to their favored caste and religious groups in exchange for political patronage.

Update: Just came across olpcnews.com’s post which gives more details.

Satish Jha, president and CEO of OLPC India has announced via IDG that two government organizations and one private-sector entity placed a 250,000 XO laptop order. Apparently, the XO laptops will be distributed to about 1,500 schools, starting in June.

This is seriously disturbing. They are doing their best to further impoverish a seriously poor country. Hell would be too good for these.

I suppose it should not come as any surprise that it is now being claimed that the $10 cost was a mis-statement and the actual cost is $100. And like the “$100″ OLPC which actually costs twice as much, probably the Indian laptop will — if it ever is actually produced — cost anything between $200 to $400, at which point it would be pointless as currently laptops are being produced for around $200 a pop by many manufacturers. I think it is a safe bet that the government officials who continue to make their $10 claims are clueless about technology and about the complexity of building a complex machine.

The newspapers are reporting that the laptop will be unveiled today. A couple of reports even quote yours truly.

However, some experts doubt that a laptop at $20 or $10 is commercially sustainable. Rajesh Jain, managing director of Netcore Solutions and a pioneer of low-cost computing in India, said: “You cannot even [make] a computer screen for $20. And India does not build much computer hardware. So where will the savings come from?”

Some bloggers today saw the new laptop as nothing more than a “souped up calculator”. The sceptism was summed up by Atanu Dey, whose blog read: “If the government could pull-off a near-impossible technological miracle, does it not imply that the entire global computer industry is either totally incompetent or else it is a huge scam which produces stuff at very little cost and sells them at exorbitant prices.” [guardian.co.uk.]

Both Rajesh and I quoted in the same news item . Here’s a bit from Indian Express:

But even the most rudimentary netbooks cost more than ten times as much, and it is uncertain how this laptop will manage to display most internet content or really, even cover the cost of its material components. Atanu Dey, economist and tech commentator, has been scathing in his attack on the credulous press that bought the ten-dollar boast.[indianexpress.com]

A collaborative team between the Indian governments ministry of science and ministry of technology will unveil a super-low-cost computer on February 3rd, as part of the country’s $10 laptop project. Specifications of the notebook – which is intended for education use – are unconfirmed, but unofficial sources suggest it will have 2GB of memory, both ethernet and WiFi connectivity, the ability to expand the storage and low power requirements of just 2W, all in a small, portable package. [Slashgear]

Here’s what I feel like.

(“I see dead people” is one of my all-time favorite line from a movie.)

Like Milton Friedman saw money supply factors behind every economic disaster (which provoked Robert Solow to remark “Everything reminds Milton Friedman of the money supply. Everything reminds me of sex, but I try to keep it out of my papers”), I see the failure of the Indian education system behind every episode of public stupidity.

I am quite willing to recognize that government officials are not the sharpest knives in the drawer — one secretary for higher education said, “At this stage, the price is working out to be $20 but with mass production it is bound to come down” — but how does the press go about reporting their statements as if they make even the least bit of sense? How on earth is one be able to compose syntactically correct sentences and publish them in blogs without having the ability to reason worth a damn, like this item in The Better India illustrates?

The writer states that poor people cannot afford laptops for education now but this “is poised to change in the near future with the advent of a new Rs. 500 laptop (currently in prototype phase).” Why? Is it plain gullibility? He read somewhere that the government has claimed it to be so and uncritically accepts it as something that is even remotely possible. Besides that, what he fails to do is basic arithmetic.

I think that the Indian education system fails dramatically when it comes to teaching basic arithmetic. Of course they do teach 2 plus 2 is 4 and that sort of thing. But it does not teach how to reason after doing the sums. It is not just how to add that matters but what and why of addition that matter more.

So what’s wrong with a $10 laptop? What’s wrong is that it flies in the face of all reasonable expectations about the world. It is disconnected with reality. The reality is that Nicholas Negroponte’s OLPC project tried desperately to build a $100 laptop and despite having access to considerable talent and expertise, the best it could do was a machine that costs around $200. What this tells us is that hardware costs, though they have fallen dramatically over time, are still high enough that it is virtually impossible to produce a laptop for around $100. If it were possible, they would have done it.

One has to either ignore — or be totally ignorant of — physical, commercial, and technological limitations to make an outlandish claim that the Rs 500 laptop will consume 2 watts of power. Even a small phone consumes more than that, and any laptop is a lot more complex than a cell phone.

The most compelling reason for totally rejecting this claim of a Rs 500 laptops is this: if the government, together with “students of Vellore Institute of Technology, scientists in Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, IIT-Madras” could pull-off a near-impossible technological miracle, does it not imply that the entire global computer industry is either totally incompetent or else it is a huge big scam which actually produces stuff at very little cost and then sells them at exorbitant prices.

As far as I know, the global IT industry is viciously competitive and therefore cannot price their goods — especially consumer hardware — at prices too far above costs. So if the price of some display is $200, one can be reasonably sure that that is pretty much very close to cost. Furthermore one can be confident that each manufacturer is trying its best to reduce the cost as much as possible — because that is how they make their profits. That’s called competition in the market.

So if one were to believe that some entity is capable of producing some sort of laptop at a cost of Rs 500, then one has to believe that that entity can overturn the entire global IT industry by producing it cheaply and undercutting every other vendor in the world. If the laptop costs Rs 500, presumably each major component of it must cost less than Rs 50, assuming that it has at least 10 major components. Since these components each actually cost Rs 500 at least (and most cost in the thousands), if the government can produce them at a tenth of those costs, clearly the government of India should be in the hardware manufacturing business. Clearly the Intels, HPs, Dells, Samsungs, IBM, etc should be worried.

But wait! It is not that the cost is Rs 500 but the price will be Rs 500. Perhaps that’s what the government means. The government will sell it for Rs 500. And you and I will foot the bill. Votes. Votes bought at our expense. Good thinking, dear UPA.

A recent article “One Laptop Per Child: What went wrong” by Jon Evans writing for The Walrus, makes interesting reading. Jon is not a fan of the OLPC and says that “it was a bad idea to begin with” and that “the XO laptop is a piece of crap.”

Meanwhile, the rest of the world has already lapped them. My Acer Aspire One netbook is faster, has more memory, a better screen and keyboard, connects to encrypted Wi-Fi networks, renders Wikipedia correctly, and has a user-friendly interface with many useful applications. There’s no comparison: it’s miles better, for a comparable price. As far as I can tell, the OLPC team so wanted to be revolutionaries that they insisted on reinventing everything at once, and as a result, failed everywhere. (Although to be fair they did inadvertently spur the growth of the netbook market that has since entirely overtaken them.)

But that hardly even matters, because the whole idea of distributing laptops to poor children was completely misguided to begin with. Did the OLPC braintrust think they were bringing modern technology to the Third World? They were years too late; it’s already there, in the form of the not-so-humble-any-more cell phone.

Jon says that what Negroponte should have done is to give one smartphone to every child. I don’t agree with Jon on that: phones are only marginally useful for educational purposes. I think laptops are much more useful. It is not the utility of laptops that I question; I question the cost at which that utility is delivered.

The OLPC team responded with “What Went Wrong with the Walrus’ OLPC Review“. Cory Doctorow is quoted in there —

I believe that the world’s poor will derive lasting, meaningful benefit from widespread access to technology and networks. And I believe that laptop computers will eventually find their way into the hands of practically every child in the developing world, even if the OLPC project shuts its doors tomorrow.

The OLPC project is in trouble. It laid off half its staff earlier this month and cut the salaries of the remaining 32 people. However it turns out for the OLPC project eventually, the world has gained from the learnings that the project provided. Part of the price for the lessons will no doubt be paid by the people of some poor countries whose governments have bought the XO for some of their children. That’s just the way it is.

(Hat tip: Naman for the link to Jon’s article.)

I had received an email saying that Prof Negroponte would like to meet with me after the presentation. Negroponte, as most people know, is the founder and chairman of the OLPC project and a co-founder of the MIT Media Lab. The announcement said, “Professor Nicholas Negroponte will discuss the MIT-Media Labs developed XO-laptop which is widely seen as revolutionizing primary education around the world…”

The OLPC’s XO is going to be much in the news. BusinessWeek’s Nandini Lakshman called me on Saturday to chat about the impending launch of OLPC India. She was going to accompany the OLPC team to Khairat, a village close to Mumbai where the XO is being premiered. You can read the details of that project in Nandini’s report in Businessweek: One Laptop Per Child Lands in India.

The presentation by Negroponte was predictable. I had been to one earlier in June last year in Addis Ababa. He speaks of the XO with the conviction, passion and pride of a parent for his favorite child. Outside in the lobby were a couple of XOs, the cute little green machine. First time I handled one and I think it deserves all the praise it gets for its design.

At the too brief question/answer session, I got the chance to point out that “we should keep in mind that India spends, on average, around $5 per student per month, compared to the US which spends around $1,200 per student per month. Even if the per month cost of the laptop is of the order of $10 per student, it represents multiples of the current spending in India.”

I have been following the OLPC story for a while on this blog. I think that technology — especially information and communications technology — presents tools that are going to transform how education is done and what it achieves. It will really be appropriate to call it a revolution and it is just a matter of “when”, not “if.” Tools transform; they change processes, and eventually they change the product. The process of education which has essentially remained unchanged for at least a hundred years is ripe for change, whether or not the current bosses of the system are willing or not.

But I don’t think that the XO is the answer to any of the basic problems that Indian education system faces. Some people just don’t get it: that something can be quite useful and good, and at the same time inappropriate for a given situation.

I have no reason to doubt the glowing reviews that the XO has received. I have no difficulty believing that all else being equal, a child with an XO is better off than one without one. All else being equal, a person with a BMW is better off than a person without a BMW.

Negroponte speaks very eloquently about how children gifted an XO get terribly excited about going to school and learning. So would I. So would the child get excited about going to school if he gets the promise of a much-need mid-day meal. Incentives matter.

But eventually we have to face the fact that if children are not excited about going to school and have to be enticed by promises of goodies, then we have a problem whose genesis lies deep within the system and superficially dealing with the symptoms are bound to be in vain.

Anyway, these people are not doing arithmetic. I am not opposed to the XO. I did the arithmetic and the results indicate that India is too poor to afford the XO. I fail to understand which part of this argument the OLPC people don’t get.

Let me conclude with a story that I found heartbreaking and much as I would like to forget that I read it, I cannot. And pardon me for relaying this unhappy story.

It was in one of the local Mumbai newspapers. I think it was in the Mid-Day about 10 days ago. It said that a security guard had noticed a 12-year old boy hanging about the school gate for a couple of days. He alerted some social workers. They questioned him. He said that he wanted to go to school, and so he was waiting at the gate. They found out that his relatives had brought him to Mumbai from some other town and abandoned him.

He gave them the particulars of his home address and names of his relatives. The social workers decided to get in touch with his relatives but the boy said that they will not want him back, and that anyway he wanted to go to school. The newspaper report then says that somehow the boy gave the social workers a slip and they had no idea where he went.

Imagine yourself at 12 years of age. You see kids your age going to school wearing nice clothes, being cared for by parents, having friends — and you yourself are abandoned in a city and you desperately wish to go to school. I imagined that and it broke my heart.

How could the social workers be so incompetent that they lost the kid? If they had only put him up for a few days and in the newspaper report included contact details, I would have been happy to pay for that kid’s schooling and all other costs. I could easily spare the few thousand rupees it would cost every month. I was furious with the reporter for not doing a better job of recording the social organization which mishandled the case.

I can easily imagine that many other readers of that story would also have stepped forward to help the boy.

Anyway, that story once again underlined a few hard facts to me. Yes, I could help that one boy. But there are tens of millions like him who would love have a decent shot at life. Not only I am too poor to help them all, even our society is too impoverished to help its children. The children have no rights at all. The society mindlessly produces children that it does not have the resources to care for.

In Delhi I saw huge bill-boards that said, “India values its children.” I think they were paid for by the government of Delhi, or maybe by some consumer goods company. The disconnect between the claim and the reality could not have been more jarring.

Heartlessly the society just produces more children without a thought to producing the stuff that these children need — food, shelter, education, and a thousand other things. The government sees these as vote banks — they will grow up to be illiterate and poor and their votes will be bought for a few rupees worth of bribes, or the promise of some reservation or the other. Then these poor will in turn produce more children. The cycle continues. And the writers write opinion pieces on the demographic dividend and the peddlers of laptops say buy millions of our laptops and you will have a great educational system.

Yeah right.

But a bit of thinking brought me to the (apparently contradictory) conclusion that laptops in the school learning environment is detrimental to learning. I love the idea of using technology in schools but totally distrust the idea of one-on-one laptop use in schools. In 2006 I wrote, “It is predictable that in the near future, good schools around the world will prohibit school students the use of laptops while in class, just as students are not allowed cell phones.”

I arrived at that position by considering my own educational experience and how I behave. I realize that it is risky to generalize broadly based on one’s personal experience but there you have it. I wrote this nearly two years ago in the context of my own years in school:

Question: would we have become better educated if we had access to laptops and the internet? Arguably yes. At least some of us would have had a richer educational experience. Strictly speaking for myself, I would have probably flunked. I would have surfed the web for god alone knows what, I would have played computer games (I once spent an entire year playing Solitaire on my laptop), I would have wasted all my time socializing on the web. In short, I am grateful that I got access to the internet only after my basic education was complete. Even now, as a grown up and presumed responsible person, I find that my work suffers when I start surfing the web. I am sure that if my internet privileges are not restricted, I will probably never finish the work I am supposed to do and I fear that I will get fired.

What brings this topic of laptops in schools in mind is a recent Slate (June 5th) article “The $100 Distraction Device: Why giving poor kids laptops doesn’t improve their scholastic performance.” (Thanks to all who emailed me the link.)

The article reports the research findings of two economists into the question of whether computers and access to the web actually help school kids. Their finding: “For many kids, computers are indeed more of a distraction than a learning opportunity. . . that merely providing access may be more of a curse than a blessing . . . just giving kids computers? Might as well just ship them PlayStations.”

Some schools are wising up and taking away the laptops from kids in school. In May 2007, an article in the NY Times, “Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops” reports:

LIVERPOOL, N.Y. — The students at Liverpool High have used their school-issued laptops to exchange answers on tests, download pornography and hack into local businesses. When the school tightened its network security, a 10th grader not only found a way around it but also posted step-by-step instructions on the Web for others to follow (which they did).

. . . Scores of the leased laptops break down each month, and every other morning, when the entire school has study hall, the network inevitably freezes because of the sheer number of students roaming the Internet instead of getting help from teachers.

So the Liverpool Central School District, just outside Syracuse, has decided to phase out laptops starting this fall, joining a handful of other schools around the country that adopted one-to-one computing programs and are now abandoning them as educationally empty — and worse.

. . . school officials here and in several other places said laptops had been abused by students, did not fit into lesson plans, and showed little, if any, measurable effect on grades and test scores at a time of increased pressure to meet state standards. Districts have dropped laptop programs after resistance from teachers, logistical and technical problems, and escalating maintenance costs.

I will not quote any more from the article but there are lots of lessons reported in that piece and I think that Indian education policymakers have to learn from the experiences of others — others who have tried technology and learnt from costly lessons.

The State of the OLPC Universe

So what’s new in the OLPC world? Two articles by Steve Lohr from the last month in the NY Times bring us up to speed. Steve’s first article, “Microsoft Joins Effort for Laptops for Children” (May 16th, 2008) reported that finally talks between Negroponte and Gates resulted in the decision to release the OLPC laptop with a Windows XP option sometime this month in some countries.

The OLPC’s dalliance with Microsoft apparently led Walter Bender — who oversaw software development — to resign. Steve’s second article, “Why Walter Bender Left One Laptop Per Child” (May 27th, 2008) says,

Walter Bender, a longtime collaborator of Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the nonprofit laptop group, left O.L.P.C. in April. Mr. Bender oversaw software development for the project. His departure had been the subject of blog posts that suggested his exit was because a pact with Microsoft was in the works.

Negroponte said Bender’s departure was “a huge loss to OLPC” but also claimed “that some people, including Walter, became much too fundamental about open source.”

Oh that must have hurt! Calling people “fundamentalists” is not good these days. Bender’s response:

“Microsoft stepping in is the symptom, not the disease,” he said in the interview. The issue, in his view, is whether the tools that bring computing to children are “agnostic on learning” or “take a position on learning.”

“O.L.P.C. has become implicitly agnostic about learning,” he said. The project’s focus, he said, is on bringing low-cost laptop computers to children around the world. “It’s a great goal, but it’s not my goal,” he said.

So what’s Bender up to? He’s a founder of Sugar Labs. Here’s more from Steve:

The Sugar software, which provides the user interface for O.L.P.C. laptops, is the means toward the end of a “constructionist learning model,” said Mr. Bender. It’s an approach that builds on the conceptual work of Jean Piaget, the Swiss philosopher and developmental theorist, and the practical research of his intellectual descendants like Seymour Papert, the M.I.T. computer scientist, educator and inventor of the Logo programming language, designed for education.

The constructionist model, put simply, says people learn best by building things — solving problems by “constructing” answers as active agents — instead of by being passive recipients of facts and received knowledge.

Computing is potentially an ideal tool for constructionist education because a computer is a universal machine and software is a building material without material constraints. (In fairness, Mr. Negroponte, founder of the M.I.T. Media Lab, has also been a champion of the constructionist education agenda over the years.)

Mr. Bender says he thinks the collaborative, interactive learning environment embodied by Sugar could be “a game changer in how technology and education collide.” He says he wants to see the Sugar software run on many different kinds of hardware and software platforms, even on Windows, if the Sugar experience is not sacrificed.

“It’s not about Microsoft being evil,” Mr. Bender said. “It’s about optimizing the chance of having a positive impact on education, and that is what Sugar is about. And that mission would be endangered by being too tightly coupled to one hardware vendor, O.L.P.C.”

So the OLPC is now a hardware vendor and the goal is to sell laptops. In a very candid (and long piece) cleverly titled “Sic Transit Gloria Laptopi” on his blog on May 18th, Ivan Krstić, formerly director of security architecture at the OLPC, tells you everything you ever wanted to know about the OLPC but never dared to ask. For instance, he writes that he quit “when Nicholas told me — and not just me — that learning was never part of the mission.”

If you have any interest in the OLPC and what intrigues have occurred and are going on, you must read Ivan’s article. It presents a comprehensive account of the genesis of the OLPC project.

There is one point that Ivan makes that particularly resonated with me. Many proponents of laptops for children claim that children futzing around with software will help them learn. Perhaps it will help them learn how to fix and write software. But learning is not only about fixing open-source software, or making fancy multimedia presentations and videos. For every child who gets excited about fixing software and learns, there are scores of others who would be better off concentrating on learning other subjects instead of having to waste time dealing with hard to use software and hardware.

Here’s a nice quote from him:

My theory is that technical people, especially when younger, get a particular thrill out of dicking around with their software. Much like case modders, these folks see it as a badge of honor that they spent countless hours compiling and configuring their software to oblivion. Hey, I was there too. And the older I get, the more I want things to work out of the box. Ubuntu is getting better at delivering that experience for novice users. Serious power users seem to find that OS X is unrivaled at it.

Anyway, this post is getting too damn long and I will end it with the concluding paras from Ivan’s post (for the record.)

I’m trying to convince Walter not to start a Sugar Foundation, but an Open Learning Foundation. For those who still care about learning in this whole clusterfuck of conflicting agendas, the charge should be to start that organization, since OLPC doesn’t want to be it. Having a company that is device-agnostic and focuses entirely on the learning ecosystem, from deployment to content to Sugar, is not only what I think is sorely needed to really take the one-to-one computer efforts to the next level, but also an approach that has a good chance of making the organization doing the work self-sustaining at some point.

So here’s to open learning, to free software, to strength of personal conviction, and to having enough damn humility to remember that the goal is bringing learning to a billion children across the globe. The billion waiting for us to put our idiotic trifles aside, end our endless yapping, and get to it already.

Let’s get to it already.

A high profile contemporary example of an inappropriate technical intervention is the XO laptop promoted by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project headed by the celebrated technologist and former head of MIT Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte. The grand vision is to assist in the education of children in developing economies by providing each child at government expense with a laptop created especially for that purpose.

The XO is a technological masterpiece of good design and fabrication. It costs around US$200 and has features suitable for use by children. It consumes power frugally, can withstand rough use, and can be used in hot and dusty environments. However, the OLPC promoters claim that it is not a laptop project but rather it is about education. Their goal is to bridge the digital divide so that children in poorer parts of the world can also have access to the digital educational resources through the Internet.

The poor of the world are on the wrong side of many divides, not just the digital divide. There are numerous other divides —nutrition, health-care, basic education, infant mortality, even safe drinking water. All these divides are rooted in the greater underlying divide we can call the income divide. Fixing the income divide involves economics. The most significant flaw of the OLPC is that it ignores basic economics.

The digital divide is real enough but it is not the most pressing problem facing poor people. That it is not even a real hindrance to basic education is evidenced by the fact that 99.99 per cent of humanity has become educated without the use of high technology. Saying that laptops and access to the Internet can potentially assist in educating the poor is akin to claiming that one car per family can help with transportation needs. Of course it can. But technical feasibility does not imply economic feasibility at all.

The economics argument against the XO is about “opportunity costs”. When evaluating alternatives, one has to weigh the benefits of an action, buying cakes for example, against the forgone benefits of other actions, buying bread and butter, which are precluded because of the costs of that action. A full implementation of the XO project for India would involve the purchase of 100 million laptops and would cost around Rs 50,000 crore every year. That is obviously impossible but even if it were possible, the benefits of a laptop for every child have to be weighed against the benefits from spending the same amount in schools, teachers, nutrition and healthcare for those children.

The Indian education system has failed to live up to its mission. School dropout rates by the end of primary education are around 50 per cent and by the XII standard rise to around 90 per cent. The failure is partly due to the low priority given to primary education despite all the high sounding rhetoric of policy makers and the language of the Constitution of India. That is a problem of political economy, not of technology. Thankfully, by some stroke of luck, the Indian government decided against buying into the OLPC project. It is easy to imagine that the XO could have become one more of the goodies distributed by the government to favoured constituencies in exchange for political patronage.

For India to develop, it has to find a way to educate all its children. The current system is severely supply-constrained and therefore is only accessible to those who are well off. The poor are unable to secure a decent basic education because the total governmental control over education ensures low quality and limited supply. Lacking a good basic foundation, the poor are unable to compete for the limited tertiary education opportunities.

Educating its population is arguably the most important task of any society, perhaps second only to the primary needs of food, shelter and clothing. It is a fact that many societies — even some very poor ones — have achieved universal primary education. However, a functioning educational system is not impossible. It is always a matter of political will and collective social consciousness, not a matter of building laptop bridges across digital divides.

It takes little insight to see that laptops would be low on the list of priorities of the developing-country poor. One Laptop per Child makes as much sense as One iPod per Child or One Snowmobile per Child.

He quotes some figures from the world hunger site:

In the Asian, African, and Latin American countries, well over 500 million people are living in what the World Bank has called “absolute poverty.” Every year, 15 million children die of hunger. For the price of one missile, a school full of hungry children could eat lunch every day for five years. Throughout the decade, more than 100 million children will die from illness and starvation. The World Health Organization estimates that one-third of the world is well fed, one-third is underfed, and one-third is starving. Since you’ve entered this site, at least 200 people have died of starvation. One in 12 people worldwide is malnourished, including 160 million children under the age of 5. Nearly one in four people, or 1.3 billion—a majority of humanity—live on less than $1 per day, while the world’s 358 billionaires have assets exceeding the combined annual incomes of countries with 45 percent of the world’s people. Let’s include Negroponte and the Google billionaires.

A bit more from the article:

“Sir, our village has no water!” “Jenkins, get these people some glassware!”

But, wait. Think of how cool it would be! Think of how many families will get to experience the friendly spam-ridden Information Super Ad-way laced with Nigerian scams, hoaxes, porn, blogs, wikis, spam, urban folklore, misinformation, sites selling junk from China, bomb-making instructions, jihad initiatives, communist propaganda, Nazi propaganda, exhortations, movie clips of cats playing the piano, advertising, advertising, and more advertising. Do you now feel better about the world’s problems, knowing that some poor tribesman’s child has a laptop? What African kid doesn’t want access to Slashdot?

Of course, it might be a problem if there is no classroom and he can’t read. The literacy rate in Niger is 13 percent, for example. Hey, give them a computer! And even if someone can read, how many Web sites and wikis are written in SiSwati or isiZulu? Feh. These are just details to ignore.

A Rube Goldberg machine is an extremely complex apparatus that performs a very simple, very easy task in an indirect and convoluted way. The most horrible examples of his machines have an anticipation factor, as the machine makes slow but steady progress toward its goal.

The term also applies as a classification for a generally over-complicated apparatus or piece of software. . . The term “Rube Goldberg machine” first appeared in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary with the definition “accomplishing by extremely complex roundabout means what actually or seemingly could be done simply.”

Rube Goldberg’s inventions are a unique commentary on life’s complexities. They provide a humorous diversion into the absurd that lampoons the wonders of technology. These satires of man’s ingenuity resonate in modern life for those seeking simplicity in the midst of a technology revolution. Goldberg’s machines can also be seen as a physical representation of the pataphysical, carrying a simple idea to a nonsensical, ornamented extreme. His work has inspired many cartoonists.

You cannot do better than that, can you? I am afraid that reality can imitate fantastic absurdities beyond our expectations. Here’s how you notch up the absurdity one additional peg: power the OLPC using belts, levers, cows, and a car alternator. (Hat tip: Shiv Senthilvel.)

You know, I have been a great believer in the “One Blackboard per School” idea myself and written about it here. Well, as it happened, Cyrus stopped by my place in Santa Clara yesterday afternoon and we had a brief conversation about OLPC and other matters. Today he has a brief report on BBC’s “The World” program on Public Radio International. Near the end, I explain why the OLPC could increase the digital divide. Listen here.

[Graphics from the IEEE article. Permission to reproduce the graphics here requested.]

The OLPC device is a technological marvel in itself. A great deal of innovation and innovative technological thinking has been invested in it. But geeks are not necessarily the most well-equipped to address social engineering challenges especially those encountered in poor developing economies. As owners of hammers are reputed to perceive all problems as nails, technology enthusiasts often miss the non-technical nature of many problems that plague the developing world.

If India had the resources to pay for an OLPC, it would have been wonderful because not only would every child who needed it would have had one, but more importantly it would have meant that India is rich enough to not only provide every child with what is needed for basic education but also to give kids what they truly need to be competitive in the future. But India does not have the US$ 60,000,000,000 (sixty billion dollars) which I estimate it would cost for providing OLPC to 200 million students. Reality is that India does not even have the resources to even fund the most primitive of schools for all–tens of thousands of classrooms don’t even have the money for blackboard and chalk.

I wish OLPC all success and I envy those kids who will get to use them. I am really sorry for the millions of Indian children who would not have a chance to use it.

Postscript: You may also wish to read the supporting article by my friend Ethan Zuckerman titled “Other Roads to Computing for All.” Our very own Rajesh Jain is also driving a computing for all venture: see the Newsweek International cover story on Novatium.

Open source software should compete against non-open source variants. Different hardware, similarly, should compete. The one-size-fits-all approach is flawed because Western academics can’t know the specific needs of two billion users. The African child who desperately wants to be a graphic designer for the African subsidiary of global company might want a computer that can run Adobe software. A child musician might want a computer that can run Sibelius, the music composition software used by famous composers and American and European schools. The one-size-fits-all laptop won’t run these programs.

My opposition to the OLPC is grounded on the fact that it bypasses the market mechanism. It involves the government and its inefficient and corrupt bureaucracies. The problem of the insufficient resources for education in poor economies is compounded by the almost certain misallocation of whatever little there is by going for the OLPC.

Singleton concludes his post with a quote from me:

Moreover, the laptop proposal is simply a very wasteful use of money when there are more important priorities. The Indian Ministry of Education has attacked the laptop as “pedagogically suspect”. India’s Atanu Dey says that in his country:

“Tens of millions of children don’t go to school, and of the many who do, they end up in schools that lack blackboards and in some cases even chalk. Government schools – especially in rural areas – are plagued with teacher absenteeism. The schools lack even the most rudimentary of facilities such as toilets (the lack of which is a major barrier to girl children.)”

So, how long before eBay gets flooded with people flogging the things?

I think the OLPC is a great idea and will benefit a lot of people. Unfortunately, that lot does not include students in poor underdeveloped economies such as India. The OLPC is irrelevant in the context of Indian education. It’s a technological solution, and the problem in India is largely non-technological. It doesn’t make sense to me to recommend an unaffordably expensive technological fix to a non-technical problem. I think that some very clever people have misunderstood the nature of the problem. It is as if someone recommends casting spells to fix a broken car. Psychological methods cannot address mechanical problems.

Here’s how I see the problem of education in India. India’s primary education is in trouble, which spells trouble higher up the chain. Around ninety-four percent drop out by grade twelve. Only six percent go to college, and of those who graduate college, only about a quarter are employable.

Why is the Indian education system in the pits? Primarily for the same reasons that the Indian economy is in the pits: government control, indeed governmental stranglehold, of the economy. It is instructive to see that whenever, for whatever reasons, the government has let go of the stranglehold (or was not involved in to start off with), that sector has flourished, and how!

For example, consider telecommunications. In five decades of governmental monopoly the telecommunications sector had a base of twenty million users; now absent the monopolistic stranglehold of the government on the telecommunications sector, we add twenty million users in three months.

Let me underline that: THREE MONTHS as opposed to FIFTY YEARS. Sure, technical progress (cellular technology) is a factor. But it is not the major factor.

It is easy to demonstrate why government intervention in the Indian economy explains why the Indian economy performs miserably. Let’s for the moment consider that as read. This fact is relevant in understanding why OLPC does not make sense in the Indian context.

Indian education suffers from government intervention and lack of resources. Resource constraints are both financial and human capital. Furthermore, the limited financial resources are leaked away through bureaucratic and political corruption and ineptitude. The major barriers in education are not technological and therefore a technological solution is not going to alter the situation. Indeed, the OLPC would make the situation worse in the Indian context.

Electronics is neither necessary nor sufficient for education. Merely providing laptops is not going to solve the problem. I have argued before that the much lamented “digital divide” is at best a misguided notion and at worst a device used by self-serving money grubbing powerful vested interests to milk the poor for all they are worth.

In the Indian context, the OLPC could in fact widen the “digital divide” and make the system far worse than it is today. The solution to India’s educational problems will and must use technology intensively, but it will have little to do with children toting laptops around.

OK, the Problem with OLPC in India:

1. India cannot afford two hundred million laptops at an upfront cost of US$40 billion. Merely buying a million laptops for $200 million will be a problem, as you would have to figure out which one out of every two hundred students will be the lucky one to have a laptop.

2. One million laptops has an opportunity cost. That is, the money could be spent on other things. $200 million could be used to provide one million students with one full year of education plus boarding and lodging in rural India. This money could be spent locally and provide jobs and have the usual economic multiplier effect.

3. Even if we had the $40 billion to spend on OLPC, we would not have solved the real problem of why India has half the illiterates in the world. Government involvement is the problem. And OLPC actually would increase government involvement.

Prediction:

1. The countries that can afford to buy laptops in numbers comparable to their student population will not face the problems of equity and distribution. There aren’t many developing countries like that.

2. OLPC is a costly device for poor countries. It’s going to be a huge waste of money that could be more efficiently spent on other technological solutions such as radio, TV monitors, and DVD players.

[Related Links:

3. I like this post on opportunity costs. I argue that the notion of opportunity costs is basic to logically thinking about economic matters. Even many otherwise educated and sane people have a very slender grasp on this fundamental truth of our universe. ]

Why is Indian education system in the pits? Primarily for the same reasons that the Indian economy is in the pits: government control, indeed governmental stranglehold. It is instructive to see that wherever for whatever reasons the government has let go of the stranglehold (or was not involved to start off with), that sector has flourished, and how!

For example, consider telecommunications. In five decades of governmental monopoly the telecommunications sector had a base of 20 million users; now that the monopoly is released, we add 20 million users in three months.

Let me reiterate that: 3 MONTHS as opposed to 50 YEARS. Sure, technical progress (cellular technology) is a factor. But it is not the major factor. See the air transport sector in India. The seats go abegging now compared to earlier when you had to beg a bureaucrat to allow you to get a ticket on a plane. Consider the two-wheeler and the four-wheeler markets. You had to wait for 7 years to get a scooter, and you had to choose between 2 models of cars, models which were of 50’s vintage. Today the firms drag you off the street and arrange financing for you to buy one of the several hundred models of cars and two wheelers, and give you coffee while your loan is processed and give you a toaster as your drive off with your new car or scooter–all before you know what hit you. Compare 7 YEARS with one AFTERNOON. What happened? The government let go of its chokehold on that sector.

I could go on for a long while demonstrating why government intervention in the Indian economy explains why the Indian economy performs miserably. This background information is relevant in understanding whether OLPC makes sense in the Indian context.

Here is an abstract of my argument. Indian education suffers from government intervention and lack of resources. Resource constraints are both finanical and human capital. Furthermore, the limited resources available are leaked away through bureaucratic and political corruption and ineptitude. The major barriers are not technological and therefore a technological solution is not going to alter the situation. Indeed, the OLPC would make the situation worse in the Indian context, what I would call the “immiserizing technological intervention.”

First however allow me to state up front that I am all for the use of technology in education. The educational system evolved before the advent of the amazingly powerful technological tools of today such as TV, radio, PCs, the internet and the world wide web, html, java, and affordable multimedia. ICT provides the most powerful tools that can fundamentally change how education is provided efficiently and effectively. In fact, in my day job I am working on creating a system which uses ICT intensively to radically transform Indian education. I would be happy to share my vision.

I have learnt an immense amount using computers and the web. I would have loved to have a connected computer when I was growing up. Unfortunately, I saw my first computer only near the end of my undergrad work in engineering. It was a IBM mainframe. Punch card era. Anyway, I learnt reading, writing, arithmetic, and some other useful skills entirely from going to an average school with great teachers and a few books. The fact that I hadn’t even seen an electronic device till I was 20 years old does not seem to have hampered my education. Indeed, 99.99999 percent of all humans who have ever got educated have done so without the benefit of any electronic devices.

Electronics is neither necessary nor sufficient for education. Sure it is going to transform education but the lack of laptops is not the barrier that faces our educational system. Therefore merely providing laptops is not going to solve the problem. I will argue that the so-called digital divide is at best a misguided notion and at worst a device used by self-serving money grubbing powerful vested interests to milk the poor for all they are worth.

I will show that in the Indian context, the OLPC will in fact widen the “digital divide” and make the system far worse off than it is today. I will then outline the solution to India’s educational challenges. And I promise you that the solution will use technology intensively, only that it will have little to do with children toting laptops around the place.

My problem with the OLPC sort of solution to the problem of the education of poor people is that it makes no economic sense, however technologically feasible it is to create a laptop that runs on hand-cranked power and is cute as a button. I realize of course that in due course, those who try to fix a non-technical problem with technical solutions will eventually see the folly of their ways. But by then another generation of poor children would have suffered needlessly.

Generally markets weed out these sort of silliness. The problem is that the OLPC wishes to circumvent the market and go to the governments to sell the laptops. A private party would make a cost benefit analysis and will not generally buy something when there are less expensive alternatives. Governments, unfortunately, have no such compulsions. Let’s bear in mind that it’s people in government who control the public purse strings but it’s not their money in the purse. They therefore lack the incentive to spend the money efficiently. The decision to shield the OLPC from the judgement of the marketplace may perhaps be its most telling handicap.

Since the “One Laptop Per Child” (OLPC) proposal is being considered here, we have to have alternate proposals which can be considered in contradistinction to it. I propose, for arguments sake, the “One Blackboard Per School” (OBPS), “One Teacher Per School” (OTPS), and “One Set of Basic Facilities Per School” (OSOBFPS) schemes out of many potential candidates. First, we will consider how they stack up against the OLPC proposition. The next thing we do is to figure out which of the alternates is the one that is “perfect” and which therefore poses the threat to the achievement of the “good.”

It is almost common knowledge that hundreds of thousands of schools in India, especially in rural areas, don’t have blackboards and sometimes even chalk. I say “almost” because some people in positions of influence are apparently not fully aware of this ground reality. Some schools have student to teacher ratio approaching infinity (because the denominator tends to zero due to teacher absenteeism). Some schools are so strapped for resources that they cannot provide basic facilities such as toilets. It would be good to have schools where at a minimum the students are guaranteed a teacher who is present, a black board or two, some chalk, and a toilet if you please so that girls don’t suffer.

Proposing high tech tools such as laptops for education in light of the missing basic facilities is wonderfully surreal like the Cheshire cat’s disembodied smile. Alice in her adventures in Wonderland comes across the Cheshire cat and remarks that she has seen a cat without a smile before but never a smile without a cat. I have seen schools which have teachers and blackboards, and which also use laptops, but I have difficulty imagining a school where there are laptops but don’t have teachers, blackboards, chalk, and toilets. Perhaps I have not had much practice imagining impossible things.

There is a sort of hierarchy of needs when it comes to providing the basic infrastructure for education. You need, at a minimum, a trained teacher, a good place to learn in, and some teaching aids such as blackboard and chalk. Slates for the children is also a good idea if notebooks are too expensive. Next, it would be good to have books. If after providing those basics to all who need it (irrespective of their ability to pay), if we are still awash in funds, perhaps computers with internet connectivity for those who cannot afford them on their own should be provided.

Time for me to take a brief digression with tin-foil hat firmly atop my head. Why is it that you find billion dollar projects such as the OLPC but never hear of even million dollar proposals such as OBPS? The answer, I believe, lies in the nature and structure of the computer industry. Broadly it is oligopolistic. The major players can be counted on the digits of your hands. Heard of Intel, AMD, Microsoft, HP, Dell, etc? Of course you have. They have deep pockets and concentrated interests in pushing their wares on whichever market they can serve. Can you name any blackboard and chalk manufacturers? Nope. They are many, small, and barely eek out a living. So there are no OBPS schemes hitting the headlines screaming “The Blackboard Divide” unlike the OLPC and their wonderfully alliterative “Digital Divide” which strikes terror in the hearts of the do-gooders who are convinced that empowering children means giving them an expensive gizmo that neither they nor the economy can afford. (see Why Telephones, Radios, and TVs Don’t Make the Conference Circuits, Seduced by ICT, and Milking the Digital Divide.)

Well, never mind the tin-foil hat. Even non-wearers of tin-foil hats should recognize that there are commercial imperatives that motivate high-technology firms to push for adoption of expensive solutions to impoverished people. There doesn’t have to be a cabal hatching schemes with an evil glint in their eyes. If the developed economies’ markets are saturated, manufacturers of high-tech gizmos will seek out greener pastures to graze upon. When it comes to spending, educational or otherwise, it is a matter of choosing the most appropriate among several alternatives. And one has to be suitably grateful that one has the option of using laptops in school. My gripe is not that laptops are not a good idea; it is that in our case it is not appropriate because the sequencing is wrong and the cost is prohibitive.

Now we get back to my OBPS, OTPS, and OSOBFPS schemes. Let’s just reduce it to OBPS and let the headlines scream “OBPS to Bridge the Blackboard Divide.” Nope, it does not have the same zing to it as “OLPC to Bridge the Digital Divide.” Not high-tech enough; not much money in there; doesn’t make good advertising copy; doesn’t involve high-flying overpaid executives of multinationals corporations making breathless Powerpoint presentations on LCD projectors to developing economy government officials.

When I went to school, we were not on the wrong side of the blackboard divide (BD) although the digital divide (DD) was something astounding. None of us had even heard of laptops, leave alone own one. We had teachers, blackboards, chalk, slates, notebooks, books, and toilets, however. We sat in our simple classrooms, and did our sums. We (at least some of the time) paid attention to what was being taught and even did our homework. A few years later, we found ourselves proficient in the three R’s and went on to college. Moral of the story: it is possible to become educated without laptops.

Question: would we have become better educated if we had access to laptops and the internet? Arguably yes. At least some of us would have had a richer educational experience. Strictly speaking for myself, I would have probably flunked. I would have surfed the web for god alone knows what, I would have played computer games (I once spent an entire year playing Solitaire on my laptop), I would have wasted all my time socializing on the web. In short, I am grateful that I got access to the internet only after my basic education was complete. Even now, as a grown up and presumed responsible person, I find that my work suffers when I start surfing the web. I am sure that if my internet privileges are not restricted, I will probably never finish the work I am supposed to do and I fear that I will get fired.

If you have not read the overwhelming evidence about the dismal state of the Indian educational system, then take it from me for now: something like half the 7th standard students cannot read nor write and do arithmetic. Position that fact against the fact (mentioned earlier) that a large percentage of schools lack even the most basic of facilities. See the correlation? It is strongly suggestive of causation. Moral of the story: lack of basic facilities hinder basic education.

At the risk of repeating myself ad nauseum, it is not a lack of laptops that is at the root of our illiterate and innumerate children; it is the “Blackboard Divide.” Giving children laptops will not achieve anything if they cannot illiterate and innumerate. Here is an illustrative personal anecdote.

A few weeks ago, I was staying at a Tata Chemicals guest house in New Delhi. For internet access, the guest house had a room with a couple of connected PCs. The housekeeper was a young Nepali who turned on a PC and told me the password. He watched intently as I checked my mail and did other sundry stuff. I then offered to teach him how to use the PC and the web, since his job left him with lots of free time. With great enthusiasm, I told him that all he has to do was to open a browser, and then type in the address and . . . That is when he blurted out that, aside from writing down phone numbers and taking down names, he does not read nor write. Yes, he had 24-hour access to connected PCs which he could use to his heart’s content, but the PCs were as useful to him as a bicycle to a fish. Moral of the story: bridge the literacy divide if you wish to have a hope of ever bridging the digital divide.

Now it is time to do the numbers. Allow me to compare the OLPC against the OBPS (“one blackboard per school”) proposals. In a previous post (“The OLPC – Rest in Peace”) I did some back of the envelope calculations. For one million children, the cost was estimated to be US$ 200 million for the first year. Assuming that the laptops have a working life of three years, the total cost of ownership of one million laptops works out to be US$ 320 million ($200 million for the first year, and $60 million each subsequent years for “use costs”). That is approximately, $100 per child per year.

A brief note on the numbers. These are educated guesses and are suggestive of the magnitude rather than exact numbers. I believe that the argument is sufficiently robust that minor deviations from actual numbers will not affect it materially.

The $100 per child per year cost of OLPC is not instead of the other costs of teaching but rather in addition to it. You still need teachers, blackboards, and other facilities. The OLPC assumes that these are a given. I contend that there are hundreds of thousands of schools with tens of millions of children who don’t have the basics, and giving them OLPC will be about as useful as throwing both ends of the rope to a drowning person—a grand-looking gesture but of no utility. The available funds have alternate uses. Let’s examine one alternative use for a bit.

Consider a small rural school with 300 children. Ten teachers, 10 classrooms, and a few other basic amenities. From our experience, the operating cost of the school is around $12,000 per year, which includes teacher salaries ($1,000 per year). Additionally, books and other teaching and learning material add another $3,000. Total cost per year (neglecting land and building costs): $15,000, or $50 per student per year. Note that two-thirds of the operating costs of the school is allocated to teacher salaries. This has important consequences.

If we consider about 100 million children in the age group 4 through 15 need to be in school in rural India, then the total cost is of the order of US$5 billion per year. Given the student/teacher ratio of 30, we will employ about 3.33 million teachers at an annual wage cost of around $3.33 billion. The two important words in there are “employ” and “wages.” We are employing educated people as teachers and they are earning wages which they spend in the rural areas. The forward and backward linkages of this wage spending affect the entire economy more positively than the spending on buying high-cost high-technology gadgets. I posit that the multiplier effect of employing teachers in schools is greater than that of buying OLPC for India.

Let us now consider the OLPC. I am assuming that the intent is to give the laptops to children who already are going to schools which have the basic infrastructure and who have the support of teachers and parents. That is, I cannot imagine giving laptops to children who have no schools to go to. So in effect, those who lack even a basic school, don’t get laptops. The much lamented “digital divide” is being increased rather than decreased when seen from the point of view of the tens of millions who don’t even see the insides of a school. So therefore, giving an already “privileged” child a laptop at the cost of $100 per year is depriving two children of a basic education for a year (which as we estimated costs $50 per child per year.)

Imagine the government of India spending $100 a year on a relatively privileged one million children and depriving two million children of going to school. Let’s leave aside the thorny question of who gets to get the goodies; no doubt vote bank politics will figure centrally in the decision and go to further pitch one caste/religion/linguistic group against another. The immorality of arbitrarily deciding to favor one group over another is odious and abhorrent.

I absolutely agree that meritocracies fuel the engine of growth upon which pluralistic heterogeneous societies depend for economic growth and development. The issue is one of identifying the constituent elements of these meritocracies. I also admit that innate talent and abilities are endogenously determined, as Dr Banerjee pointed out in the previous post. This endogenous determination must be catalyzed through making opportunities available to as large a population as possible. The net must be cast wide to identify those who would be most able to benefit from an education. In this respect, while the OLPC has the potential to help a percentage of those who get them, it will also assuredly deny twice as many an opportunity to advance.

Now on to the point we began our deliberations with. Which of the two—the OLPC or the OBPS—is the “perfect” and which the “good”? If OLPC is the prefect solution, then clearly it will impair the good solution of providing basic educational opportunities to many; if the OBPS is the perfect solution, then the OLPC, as the good solution, may be prevented. My position is the former: in an ideal world, where all children have the opportunity to gain a basic education irrespective of the accident of birth, giving all children laptops will be an unalloyed blessing. An ideal world, which in our case we have not got, would admit the perfect solution and no trade offs will be required. The imperfect world, which is what we have, requires we trade off the potential benefit of the few for the guaranteed benefit of the many.

In conclusion, allow me to stress that I am not a Luddite. I have a deep and abiding faith in the ability of technology to solve technical problems. Today I find it inconceivable providing higher education without the aid of PCs, laptops, and the internet. Even for certain aspects of basic education, I am convinced that we have to use the power of the advances in information and communications technologies if we have to fix our educational system. In fact, I am betting my future on the use of computers for providing effective and relevant education efficiently. My proposal, however, does not depend on spending public monies on selectively providing laptops to some school children while denying some others even the opportunity for basic education.

[Previous parts: Part 1, Part 2. See also, "Formula for Milking the Digital Divide."]

As usual, you’re right on the money on this one. Up until your post, I didn’t see any that would fit an economist’s modus operandi, namely, one based on a full-blown cost benefit analysis (another way of stating your “opportuntiy cost” analysis). I’m surprised that such an evaluation is not already underway, quite independently of Negroponte’s initiative or proposal. Such an evaluation should be based, in my opinion, on some kind of pilot study (based, in turn, on a scientifically drawn stratified sample that accounts properly for demographic variation). I think it is just a matter of time before computers have to be introduced on a mass scale, particularly for the education and use of those that will make up the next generation (I don’t hold any particular brief for laptops over desktops, or individual versus community or small-group use of computer resources).

The issues you have raised with respect to, let’s call it euphemistically, “implementation,” and your concern about moral hazard are indeed all valid. These, in some sense, fall into the domain of moral imperatives — whose existence or importance I do acknowledge, but whose cost implications I do not know of any easy way to quantify. But, if we can agree that, even in pluralistic, humanistic, secular, and democratic societies, meritocracies do get created and to good purpose, then the larger issue of just who should be the (initial) beneficiaries of any OLPC-like initiative can be addressed. The IITs and IIMs are evidence enough that meritocracies exist on which progressive societies depend. However, I would hasten to add that meritocracies should, to the extent possible, be based on true proficiency and ability, rather than the selective denial of opportunity. Unfortunately, innate ability and talent tend to be discovered endogenously, i.e., they are more likely to be found in particular demographic and income groups precisely because they have had the opportunity and support to showcase them. Too bad, there isn’t an easy way to extend that discovery process to all segments of society in a resource-constrained and populous country like India. But, when it comes to advancing the computer-literacy of India’s citizens (and reaping the substantial follow-on benefits of that), should even patently selective and seemingly unfair educational programmes be eschewed until it could somehow be assured that literally not one child in that vast country — to borrow a hackneyed phrase — will be left behind? Should the “perfect” become the enemy of the “good”?

[Emphasis mine.]

An admission is apt here. Among economists I admire unconditionally, Aniruddha ranks way up on the list. His keen insights are matched by his facility with the written word. I wish I had that sort of brain power.

For now, I will leave you to ponder the issues he raises. I will post my thoughts in a bit.

[Continue on to part 3. Previous bit part 1. See also, "Formula for Milking the Digital Divide."]

The Human Resources Development (HRD) ministry of the government of India recently decided to just say no to the $100 laptop that Prof Negroponte of MIT Media Lab has been furiously peddling. He wanted the government to buy, oh, about 1,000,000 of those at the modest cost of $100,000,000 and give it to school children. Mind you, noble intentions motivate this: so that no child is left behind and the digital divide is bridged and all the kids will become computer savvy and what not.

The HRD explained that according to some American psychologist “any sustained use of computers may lead to a disembodied brain and bring about isolationist tendencies in social behaviour” and that the “pedagogic effectiveness of this initiative is not known.”

Not just that, it went on to warn that “Both physical and psychological effects of children’s intensive exposure implicit in OLPC are worrisome. Health problems of our rural children are well known; personalised intensity of computer-use could easily exacerbate some of these problems”.

I bet the good folks at the HRD ministry are not as careful when it comes to their own children playing with laptops and PCs in their government provided flats in New Delhi. The reasoning behind promoting OLPC in poor countries is flawed (as I had written earlier: Formula for milking the digital divide); but the reasoning behind the HRD ministry’s rejection of the OLPC is worse. I am not surprised.

However, the Secretary to the Ministry, Sudeep Banerjee wrote to the Planning Commission and argued that instead of spending on laptops, funds should be allocated to univeralizing secondary education. Good point, Mr Banerjee. Still, Banerjee said that OLPC “may actually be detrimental to the growth of creative and analytical abilities of the child”. Not at all convincing.

My opposition to the OLPC revolves around the notion of opportunity cost. First, let’s briefly consider the total cost. There’s the direct cost of a laptop, which was first advertized to be $100 but now has been pegged at $140. Add to that the operational costs. They will include the cost of maintenance. Assume that over its lifetime, given that it is a new piece of hardware, it is a conservative 25 percent, or $35. Then there are the “use costs.”

Use costs are incurred because the laptops are used by people. Predictably, people–especially children–drop things, misplace things, get things stolen. So what happens then? Does the government replace those laptops? Who pays?

Then who gets those laptops? There are, I estimate, about 100 million school-going children in India. Can we afford to buy laptops for them all? If not, who then will be favored? Will there be “reservations” for laptops so that favored religious and caste groups be given preference? Who decides? Will those in charge of handing out the laptops make a bit on the side, either directly or indirectly, through their power to deny or grant a shiny new gizmo to thousands of people. Power in the hands of people invariably corrupts them.

Who owns the laptop? The child or the parent? What does ownership mean? Will the parent be held liable for the cost of the laptop if the laptop is “lost”? Will a very poor family be able to shoulder that liability? Remember that the cost is $140, which is about 30 percent of the per capita income in India. Who pays for routine maintenance? If the user is not responsible, then there is the problem of moral hazard: the user will not be sufficiently diligent in caring for the object.

The total costs then is the sum of the direct costs ($140), the maintenance costs ($35), the use costs ($25, say): $200. Let’s say that India buys only 2 million of those cute green machines. The cost: $400,000,000.

Now on to the reason why I oppose the OLPC: opportunity costs. Some time ago, I had explore the notion of opportunity costs in “Casting Spells to Fix a Broken Car.”

The proponents of OLPC argue that spending hundreds of millions of dollars on laptops will empower many children, educate them, make them cross the digital divide. You will not get any argument from me against that. Some unknown percentage of those who use those laptops will benefit from them; some unpredictable percentage will get computer literate. Those things will happen because of the OLPC. My concern is with things that will not happen because of OLPC.

This point is worth stressing. It is not just that we make A happen; we have to also recognize that we have to forego the opportunity of making B happen. The important thing is to weigh the benefits of A against the benefits of B. Only if the former out weighs the latter, can we convincingly argue for making A happen.

Spending a few hundred million dollars will help some children, and also enrich the manufacturers of the laptops (Chinese manufacturing), and all the middle-layers that will be invovled in the selling, maintenance, and support. Compare that to the alternative use of the same money.

Tens of millions of children don’t go to school, and of the many who do, they end up in schools that lack blackboards and in some cases even chalk. Government schools — especially in rural areas — are plagued with teacher absenteeism. The schools lack even the most rudimentary of facilities such as toilets (the lack of which is a major barrier to girl children.)

Attention and funds need to be directed to those issues first before one starts buying laptops by the millions. Fact is that we need basic education (literacy, numeracy, etc) and secondary education. These have been provided very successfully without computers around the world. Every one who went to school and became educated more than a mere 30 years ago–in the entire history of human civilization, billions of people in all–did so without having ever seen a computer. What they had was much less expensive than PCs: they had teachers and an environment conducive to learning.

Here is an analogy. By pushing OLPC, what they are trying to do is to increase the capacity of a tub made of staves of different lengths. How much water the tub can hold is then dictated by the length of the shortest stave. If one were to pour water into the tub, the water level will continue to rise but only uptil the level reaches that of the shortest stave, when it starts overflowing. To increase the capacity of the tub, you will have to lengthen the staves. But lengthening any of the staves except the shortest stave will not increase the tub capacity. And even lengthening the shortest stave beyond the length of the next shortest stave is wasted. So the strategy for increasing the tub capacity is this: lengthen the shortest stave(s) first to match the length of the next shortest stave(s), and repeat.

The shortest stave in our tub is the will and commitment of our policy makers.

[Continued in Part 2. See also "Formula for Milking the Digital Divide."]

Well, I don’t really know.

Infant or baby formula was developed in the developed world when women began to join the work force and did not have the time to breast-feed their babies. What a wonderful great invention it was. Convenience for the mother, and great nutrition for the baby.

Developed as an alternative to breast-feeding, the industry promoted it aggressively in the developed world. On the way back from the hospital after the birth of a baby, the industry gave as a “gift” all that you need to feed the baby formula—the bottles and the bottle bag–and gave just enough “free” formula so that the mother stops lactating because of lack of nursing. Once the mother goes down that formula road, there is no turning back.

Babies are important when it comes to profits for the peddlers of formula. But there are only so many babies in the developed world. For real profit, they have to tap into the babies of the under-developed world. All with the best of intentions, of course: to help the babies of the poor parts of the world because there is a “formula divide.” Why should only the rich “gain” from the wonderful benefits of baby formula?

So they aggressively began marketing it to the third world. The World Health organization estimates that around 1.5 million infants die because they are not breast fed and instead fed formula. How? Breastfeeding not only provides nutrition, but also provides immunity to the babies. Of course, for a baby whose mother cannot produce milk, formula is better than starvation. But often the mothers stop producing milk only after getting started on formula. The initial amount is given free to the mothers in the poor parts of the world and they are told that formula is much much better than breast milk. So when the free amount is over and the mother is no longer lactating, the formula has to be bought. Since it is expensive, soon the formula is severely diluted until the infant is receiving practically no nutrition and is slowly starving to death.

But even if formula were given free, there is still a problem. In the poor parts of the world, clean drinking water is a luxury. Dirty water used in preparing the formula lead to deaths through diarrhea. Feeding formula to third world infants exposes them to all sorts of diseases that arise from inadequately sterilized bottles and nipples.

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About 30 years ago, there were no personal computers in the world. Anyone reading this will find it hard to imagine life now in a world without computers and the world wide web. One wonders how one could get along in those ancient times when there were no laptops and cell phones? Yet, the world developed well enough. If you think that there is a digital divide now, what do you think the digital divide was like 50 years ago when only a few research corporations and US government agencies had computers? Yet 50 years ago, people got educated, built productive economies, conducted business and got on with their lives.

The computers and the internet are wonderful things to have. They make life absolutely wonderful for those who can afford them. Actually, you have to be able to not just afford them and also be able to afford what it takes to make them useful, such as reliable power, broadband connectivity, good useful applications, a real world to which the applications are relevant, etc. And on top of all that, you have to be sufficiently trained to use them. It is really no use if you have a computer but there is nothing that you can do with it. But if for some reason, marketing hype convinces you that you need a computer to solve all your problems, you could end up spending money you cannot afford on things that are of no value to you.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

One Laptop Per Child is a MIT Media Lab project that is getting immense amounts of press. A sub-$100 laptop for every child in the third world and the digital divide will be a thing of the past, we hear. Sure it will. Just as formula will make malnutrition a thing of the past in the third world.

Given the perverse incentives, the peddlers of these laptops will make billions of dollars selling them to third world governments. As the MIT site says, “The laptops will only be distributed to schools directly through large government initiatives.” Large government initiatives, you bet. Why? Because people who have no money will not waste their money on laptops. Only government bureaucrats with large public purses at their disposal will buy these. The Media Lab people are not stupid.

The government officials will be handsomely rewarded for spending limited public resources in buying hundreds of thousands of these to make villages into “fully computerized” villages. A few trips to the US, a chance to speak at huge conferences on “Bridging the Digital Divide” sponsored by Microsoft, HP, Intel, and the Ministry of IT. Hundreds of millions of dollars which could have been more useful in providing primary education would instead end up in the pockets of hardware manufacturers and software giants. Sure a few children will become computer-savvy, but the cost of this will be borne by the millions of children who will suffer from a lack of education.

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I know that one should not ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained as stupidity. Not everyone involved in the “laptop for every child” is motivated by greed; some are motivated by a zeal that comes from an inability to figure out what the problem is and how it can be most effectively solved. The operative word is “effectively.” You can always use a cannon where a fly-swatter is sufficient. But for the cost of a cannon, you can get a million fly-swatters which will be more effective than one cannon. Cannons are more impressive then fly-swatters, however, and that may explain their fascination with some people.

A blackboard and chalk is not as sexy as a laptop. In fact, a TV and a media player is pretty much all the hardware that you need to provide basic education to a village full of children. That hardware (and some free software) would cost all of $200 a year, and if you pay about $2000 a year as salaries to a couple of village school teachers, you can educate a 100 kids for about $20 per child per year. Compare that to just buying $100 laptops for each kid.

I am confident that the One Laptop Per Child will have the effect which is the educational equivalent of the nutritional disaster that imported formula has had on the poor parts of the world.

Yes, they do kill babies in search of profits. And yes, they will not care that millions of children will be denied primary education because they are focused on the profits to be made from selling laptops.

[There's much more here on the OLPC.

See this informative article "Breast milk or formula: making the right choice for your baby" from the Swedish Medical Center.]