I got a chance yesterday to visit the OLPC (one laptop per child) pilot in Khairat, a rural village close to Mumbai. The pilot started last October with 20 XO laptops.

It was great to see the students playing/working with their laptops: they impressed me by how confident/comfortable they were with their laptops. The teacher is incredibly dedicated to the project and the kids. He demoed us a shared chat, where he would ask problems (like 2+2=?) and the students sharing the chat session could cast their answers. All this over mesh networking, with a dead-simple way to create/join a session. One girl showed me proudly her Etoys project (drawing shapes, connections, text, animations, simple scripting), and we managed to find out how to animate the objects, which they (and I) found very cool.

I felt they were very comfortable with the interface (Sugar). The biggest shortcoming at the moment is that it is not yet localized in their own language (Marathi), so text-only commands/menus are quite hard for them, since they don’t know much English yet. Still, they are trying all possible menus, and share their discoveries with their mates. And anyway, the software will soon be localized. The team is also looking into alternative energy sources (solar, human powered generator) to deal with frequent power cuts.

Kudos to the OLPC and Reliance teams for this great pilot, which will soon be followed with more pilots all over India. Also, thanks to Carla and Venkatesh for connecting me with the team.