In a surprising twist given the country's past disparagement of the program, the One Laptop Per Child project gets a much-needed financial boost with India's purchase of 250,000 of the flagship OLPC XO laptops. Ambitiously launched in 2005, the OLPC program has struggled and downscaled to realize its vision of providing low-cost educational laptops to the Third World. With this bulk purchase from a country whose Ministry of Human Resource Development was previously so skeptical of the project it launched its own — eventually failed — competing program to build $10 laptops, the OLPC program gets a shot in the arm and 1,500 Indian schools will benefit from low-cost computing.

Although still trailing competing Intel initiative the Classmate PC in both marketshare and credibility, this boost will help the project, which may survive long enough to be made or broken by the next-generation OLPC 2.0 it hopes to unveil next year. 

This story around the web: