(Picture from News.com)

It looks like MIT's Nicolas Negroponte's $100 (or $120? or $140?) laptop will not get government support in India, albeit for some odd reasoning. This according to Atanu Dey on India's Development:

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is not going to happen in India.

The Human Resources Development (HRD) ministry of the government of India recently decided to just say no to the $100 laptop that Prof Negroponte of MIT Media Lab has been furiously peddling. He wanted the government to buy, oh, about 1,000,000 of those at the modest cost of $100,000,000 and give it to school children. Mind you, noble intentions motivate this: so that no child is left behind and the digital divide is bridged and all the kids will become computer savvy and what not.

The HRD explained that according to some American psychologist "any sustained use of computers may lead to a disembodied brain and bring about isolationist tendencies in social behaviour" and that the "pedagogic effectiveness of this initiative is not known."

More on the story at BusinessWeek.

Some have called the $100 laptop 'fundamentally flawed' or even useless while others seem a bit more enthused. The UN is backing the project.

Some video of Negroponte at TED Blog.