Talk:OLPC India

NIce to have these laptops with indian kids

Digital Literacy in India

It is a delight to see this initiative. While India is a superb software production center, digital literacy is concentrated mainly on the urban centers. Much of the rural places, where two-thirds of the population resides is almost zero in this area. We have been trying to create a rural digital initiative that will be focused on 1 million villages in India within a decade, in the context of an integrated school initiative. Hardware such as this can make this a reality!

Charles Dhanaraj Gyan Jyoti Vilas (Enlightenment from Learning) An initiative in the making (Currently I am an associate professor of management at Kelley Business School, Indiana University)

Girish R V

Localization in india is going to a big problem. Most prominent language is hindi, but there are a lot of states here which have other native languages( Tamil, Malayalam, oriya, telungu, Marathi, .. to name a few).

The extent to which English is used in India

English is one of the official languages of India, could you possibly provide some information as to what extent English is used in India please?

India has MORE language diversity than Europe. Even though English is used as the language of the educated classes to facilitate communication amongst different regions, the vast majority of India's one billion people do not know English at all or else they vaguely remember a bit from their high-school lessons.

Therefore, English is an essential component of the OLPC India project in order to give children the possibility of higher education. On the other hand, English is not sufficient because the majority of children will be unable to do anything with it until after several years of education.

In India, there are states with high and low literacy stages. The states like Kerala and goa are high in literacy rates and the peoples can speak and learn in english. Tamil Nadu and Bihar are the examples of states with low literacy rates.

I know little about India. The postage stamps have text in Hindi and English. People from India in situations such as television interviews seem to speak English. I have had a perception, which I am now begining to think was quite wrong, that English is spoken throughout India by everybody, as the common language of the country. In what language are school subjects such as physics and history taught please?

It's hard to get good statistics on this. For a 2003 article which cites data from 1994, see http://www.languageinindia.com/may2003/annika.html#chapter5 where it states that at that time around 4% of the people of India used English as their first language. I'd expect that if this percentage was correct then, it's probably fairly similar today. A much larger percentage of the people of India use English as a second language, of course. The crucial thing to remember about India is that it has no majority language. Only about 30% of the population speaks Hindi as a first language, and in many Indian states there is little desire to learn Hindi. In the 1950 Constitution, it was planned to phase out the use of English, but that has ceased to seem likely. To quote the CIA World factbook, from http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/in.html "English enjoys associate status but is the most important language for national, political, and commercial communication; Hindi is the national language and primary tongue of 30% of the people; there are 14 other official languages: Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu, Gujarati, Malayalam, Kannada, Oriya, Punjabi, Assamese, Kashmiri, Sindhi, and Sanskrit; Hindustani is a popular variant of Hindi/Urdu spoken widely throughout northern India but is not an official language."

I'm an American who's never been to India, but my impression is that virtually any person in India who has graduated from secondary school will have some knowledge of English, and nearly all college graduates will know it quite well, but that in the villages of India, children will speak the local language. --Chris Mullin christmullinster@gmail.com