Forget the one hundred dollar laptop. India has bigger, but cheaper, plans. Ten times cheaper to be exact: India"s Ministry of Human Resource Development is spearheading the project, with help from Semiconductor Complex, a state-sponsored designer and manufacturer of integrated circuits. Officials from those organizations are presently weighing system designs submitted by an engineering student from India"s Vellore Institute of Technology and a researcher from the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. The Times of India on Friday reported that the efforts thus far have yielded designs for a laptop that would cost about $47, while a $10 system remains the ultimate goal.
Last year, Negroponte"s One Laptop Per Child Organization submitted a proposal to the Indian government under which the group would have worked to produce laptops for Indian students starting at $100. Indian officials at the time criticized the proposal as insufficiently mature to be taken seriously and rejected it.