AROUND TWO hours away to the east is Navi Mumbai and another two
hours farther east towards Pune is Khairat-Dhangarwada
village, in
Raigad district, in the western state of Maharashtra. The landscape
changes from Mumbai’s high-rise buildings as one drives towards the
village. Khairat is a small village tucked far away from Mumbai, the
commercial capital of India, a four-hour drive from the
metropolis. Everything in the village points to rural settings – the
rice fields, cows, goats, chickens and hills, but one thing does not –
the XO laptop computer.
If
our federal policy-makers had, last year, rejected a proposal to fund
one million pieces of laptops for school
children at $100 per laptop,
under the one-child-one-laptop scheme (OLPC), a six-year-old, one-room
school has shown the way. The XO computer arrived at this village
school last year and is changing the lives of the children. It is the
first ever pilot project for children in India.
Oblivious
to the outer world, the 22 children have created history. The children,
all in the 5-10 year age group and hailing from a nomadic tribe,
settled many years ago in the region. They are studying in grades one
to four. All of them are beneficiaries of the project, which seeks to
take learning to new heights.
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