American magazine Businessweek reports that  Nicholas Negroponte's - everyone's fave MIT boffin - OLPC (One Laptop per Child) scheme has landed in India, again.

Well, at least it's trying to. After having had his OLPC repeatedly bashed on the nose by former Indian technology minister Arun Shourie in 2001 and secretary of education Sudeep Banerjee two years ago, Nick has now decided it'd be best to buckle up, get a helmet and team up with the Digital Bridge Foundation. Said Foundation belongs to the rather large Indian corporation Reliance Group, which again is owned by billionaire Anil Ambani, who has a lot of political clout, as do most billionaires.

Negroponte will seem to need influential bigwigs, as current scretary of education Arun Kumar Rath said that Indian primary school kids need to read and write, instead of playing with expensive notebooks. Rath however didn't mention youngsters who already have acquired such skills and who might learn how to hack code at an early age.

However, the price is still problematic, especially for a country which invests just three percent of its gross domestic product into education and whose schools lack teachers and toilets. The XO, the current OLPC model, costs $200, Negroponte expects the price to drop to $100 during the next three years when production ramps up.

Currently, 500 XO laptops have been provided by the OLPC to schools in India, whilst logistics and related stuff is being handled by the Digital Bridge Foundation. Considering the demand for the OLPC seems to be mainly from civil servants, perhaps Negroponte ought to consider making an executive model costing ten times as much. X

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