Sunday, February 01, 2009

NEW DELHI: A $10 laptop (Rs 500) prototype, with 2 GB RAM capacity, would be on display in Tirupati on February 3 when the National Mission on
Education through Information and Communication Techology is launched. The $10 laptop project, first reported in TOI three years ago, has come as an answer to the $100 laptop of MIT's Nicholas Negroponte that he was trying to hardsell to India.

The $10 laptop has come out of the drawing board stage due to work put in by students of Vellore Institute of Technology, scientists in Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, IIT-Madras and involvement of PSUs like Semiconductor Complex. “At this stage, the price is working out to be $20 but with mass production it is bound to come down,” R P Agarwal, secretary, higher education said.

Apart from questioning the technology of $100 laptops, the main reason for HRD ministry's resistance to Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project was the high and the hidden cost that worked out to be $200.

The mission launch would also see demonstration of e-classroom, virtual laboratory and a better 'Sakshat' portal that was launched more than two years ago. Sources also said that the ministry has entered into an agreement with four publishers — Macmillan, Tata McGraw Hill, Prentice-Hall and Vikas Publishing — to upload their textbooks on 'Sakshat'. Five per cent of these books can be accessed free.

The mission, with an 11th plan outlay of Rs 4,612 crore, is aimed at making a serious intervention in enhancing the Gross Enrolment Ratio in higher education. The mission has two major components. One, content generation through its portal 'Sakshat', and two, building connectivity along with providing access devices for institutions and learners.

In this context, government would give Rs 2.5 lakh per institution for 10 Kbps connection and subsidise 25% of costs for private and state government colleges.

The mission would seek to extend computer infrastructure and connectivity to over 18,000 colleges in the country, including each department of nearly 400 universities and institutions of national importance. The mission would focus on appropriate e-learning procedures, providing facility of performing experiments through virtual laboratories, online testing and certification, online availability of teachers to guide and mentor learners, and utilization of EduSat and DTH.


Source: THE TIMES OF INDIA

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`Wipro to hire 8,000 freshers'

NEW DELHI: Is the country's third-largest IT company bucking the hiring trend? Yes, so says the website ITexaminer. According to a report on the site, Wipro is making around 8,000 campus offers this fiscal year. In an email sent to all freshers seeking jobs in areas such as technical support and offshoring, the IT major has invited applications for 15,000 seats, says the report.

In the mail, the company's corporate vice president for human resources, says that nearly 14,000 offers were made last year, with the students expected to join by the end of this fiscal. He emphasised that there has been no delay in new recruits joining the company, and that those who received offers this year are expected to join the firm within the next fiscal year.

Incidentally, for the first time ever, Wipro in its Q3 report, showed a drop in its employee headcount in the IT services business by about 1,100 as compared to the earlier quarter.

The company went down by 1,092 software engineers and 226 BPO employees during the quarter. Wipro had 96,965 employees as of December 31, 2008, which includes 75,385 employees in IT business unit and 21,578 employees in the BPO unit.

In the JAS quarter, the company had 97,552 employees as of September 30, 2008. Though volumes have grown year-on-year (y-o-y), the number of employees has remained stagnant at year-ago levels.


Source: INDIA TIMES

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