It takes a laptop

India's education ministry has decided to opt out of an MIT-inspired initiative to provide $100 laptops to school children across the developing world. Calling the plan "pedagogically suspect", India's Ministry of Human Resources Development determined that its money could be better spent on badly needed classrooms and teachers than on the impact-resistant, colorful machines designed to bring computer literacy, Internet access, and educational materials to kids in remote and underserved areas. 

The decision doesn't spell the end of the initiative - Nigeria has already signed up to buy 1 million of the gadgets - but it is certainly a challenge for the One Laptop Per Child campaign, which kicked off at Davos in January 2005. India was a potentially huge market, and the computers won't go into production until at least 5 million orders are received. Be sure to check out this article in Wired about how the computers were designed with developing-world constraints in mind: impervious to dust, extra-long battery life, and able to network with other computers up to 10 miles away.