India Orders 250,000 OLPC Laptops

Although India was working on its own $10 computer, two Indian government organizations have placed an order for a quarter million OLPC notebooks.

Although for the last few years India hasn’t exactly been warm to the idea of the One Laptop Per Child project, IDG News Service is reporting two Indian government organizations have placed an order for 250,000 OLPC notebook computers. Although the order still leaves the struggling OLPC organization far short of its goal to have shipped millions of OLPC notebooks by this point, if the order plays out it could be a significant shot in the arm to the organization.

According to reports, distribution of the OLPC notebooks is set to begin in June, with as many as 1,500 schools in rural and suburban areas receiving the notebooks.

Satish Jha, the often-criticized president and CEO of OLPC India, has repeatedly stated he’d like to deploy three million OLPC notebooks in India during 2009.

The OLPC notebooks will presumably be the revved-up Gen 1.5 version of the XO-1, which features a Via C7-M processor rather than an AMD Geode and 1 GB of RAM rather than the initial 256 MB. OLPC’s ambitious Gen 2.0 notebooks are expected to be ready sometime in 2010.