By Sam Varghese (iTWire.com.au)

The One Laptop Per Child initiative, a brainwave of MIT's Nicholas Negroponte, is just the latest in a long line. When you throw in fancy phrases like "bridging the digital divide" the publicity is ensured.

The OLPC has taken on the aura of an open source effort, solely because of the involvement of Red Hat which will supply a customised GNU/Linux distribution for using on the $US100 device. A presentation on the gadget was made at the Australian Linux conference in Sydney last week.

Nobody seeks to question Negroponte's motives - the man is definitely trying to do "good" to the poorer, uneducated denizens of countries like Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Nigeria, Libya, and Pakistan, some of the countries which have signed up to participate.

Of course, like a great many other projects before it, the OLPC is predicated on the principle that technology is the remedy for a great many social and cultural ills; in other words, a touch of tech and a view of the web and hey, a great many weighty problems will vanish into the ether.

Countries like Libya and Nigeria have sufficient wealth to provide their citizens with formal education - the only thing that will bring about a change. But the corrupt governments of both countries ensure that the people stay poor: it is difficult to continue a benign or hardline dictatorship when one's subjects know that they are being taken for a ride. Keep them poor and uneducated and you can sell them myths that ensure you and your heirs continue to rule till kingdom come.

A project that teaches children basic skills like reading, writing and arithmetic is probably too hard a task for those who map out projects like the OLPC to plan and execute. Instead, we have the plan to provide laptops - which will make a handy asset to be sold on the blackmarket.

Anyone ever spared a thought about the amount of e-waste that would be created by a project like this? But then waste of every description is being shipped quietly from Western countries to the developing world every day; throwing in a couple of thousand laptops won't make such a big difference will it?

Do computers really help children learn? There are countless studies which claim they do and not surprisingly a great many of these are initiated by the tech industry. What about repetitive stress injuries, eye strain, and obesity, just three things which are common among children in the West? Has technology really been a benefactor?

Have any of the bright minds who thought up the OLPC spared a thought for the fact that sitting hunched over a laptop can distract children from social interaction and prevent them from developing language skills and keep them from creating bonds with adults? Clifford Stoll had some thought-provoking things to say about web in his classic Silicon Snake Oil.

Nine out of ten articles or comments on the OLPC are obsessed with the technology itself - the interface, the cost of running the laptop, whether the wireless chip used is a proprietary one or not, and so on. Little if no discussion has taken place to consider if the project is needed at all.

A week in a village in India would suffice to introduce great minds who think up such ideas to the realities of life in the developing world. (India has said it will not be part of the project but that you can put down to the commercial possibilities the government sees in implementing a similar project itself.) Children do not go to school because they are needed to look after cattle and take them out to graze. In many cases, children go to worksites with their mother or father and help to boost the family's meagre income. This isn't anecdotal stuff - I've lived and worked with Indian villagers in one of the most underdeveloped regions of the country.

It's easy to try and tackle effects rather than their causes - you can treat a fever and neglect the wound on your leg which causes it. But other effects will manifest themselves until the cause, the wound, is treated.

Similarly, the lack of education, the appalling literacy levels, and social practices which belong to the dark ages, are all effects; remove the cause which is a government devoted to keeping the people uninformed and illiterate and you'd probably make some progress. But that would be too difficult - so in the meantime, let's salve our guilty consciences and give them a laptop instead.