OLPC India
It is still not very clear which agencies in India would be actively participating in the OLPC project. As per the norm, the Ministry of Science and Technology might take the initiative. Until now, however, this Ministry has not issued any notification, and not placed any order with Quanta Computer Inc(the OEM for the project).
And, according to this story in the Times of India, India's HRD doesn't like the idea, believing the money could be better spent in other ways.
Nevertheless, India is a very large multicultural country with many interest groups. It is not unusual to see that there is not total agreement at a federal level, but most states in India are capable of deploying a million OLPCs due to the large population. This would actually simplify the task since a single state might need to support only 3 or 4 languages instead of 25.
In addition, there are various charitable organizations active in India, and some of them are running projects which involve deploying technology to disadvantaged areas. They often have corporate sponsorship from western companies. There is an opportunity to get some of these projects on board with the OLPC and due to the high level of worldwide visibility of the OLPC project, it will be possible to attract large corporations to support this. One million units at $100 each is $100 million dollars. And as time goes on, the unit cost of the OLPC will drop.
Languages needed for localization
Which language or languages are needed for localization for use by children in India please?
INDIA has 28 states and 18 official languages.The majority people in INDIA speaks HINDI as their spoken language.The other important languages and their respective states are as below:
MALAYALAM-------KERALA
In kerala there is a project called IT@school by Govt of Kerala. It also have a GNU/Linux Distribution called school GNU/linux Developed by Free Software foundation of india. it will be good to approch any of these people.
TAMIL-----------TAMILNADU
samarpanam a group of software professionals located in Chennai, Tamil Nadu would like to express their desire to take up the initative. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/samarpanam/
KANNADA---------KARNATAKA
TELUGU---------ANDHRA PRADESH
MARATHI---------MAHARASHTRA
ORIYA-----------ORISSA
GUJARATI-------GUJARAT
BENGALI---------WEST BENGAL
PUNJABI---------PUNJAB
MOST IMPORTANTLY... HINDI------MANY STATES THROUGHOUT INDIA: MADHYA PRADESH, RAJASTHAN, DELHI, HARYANA, UTTRANCHAL, UTTAR PRADESH.
Localization experience
The program Application Program: Test of ability with arithmetic may or may not become produced. The idea is to localize the program into many languages. There are already (2006-05-29) strings of text for English, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish.
Hindi for Uttarpardesh & uttranchal Gujrat