Satish Jha is an Indian social entrepreneur, who is currently President and CEO of OLPC India Foundation.
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It was in the late 1990s that he got interested in leveraging his experience as a corporate CIO to explore ways to address the challenges of increasing Digital Divide. [Tarahaat.com] was one of the earliest such experiments that led the movement to create kiosk based access for the rural poor <7>. He started a social entrepreneurship fund as a co-founder of Digital Partners that seeded SKS Microfinance. He was associated with the co-founding of [Baramati Conference] on ICT for Development that continues to be a leading event in this space. Following the first Baramati Conference in 2001, Baramati became the first fully wifi town anywhere <12>. He has also been associated with the formation of Kofi Annan Center for Excellence in Ghana <11>
Professor Nicholas Negroponte laid out the vision of using emerging technologies of computing and communication to have cell phones like effect on spreading education to alleviate rural poverty. By the time of the World Summit on the Information Society in December 2005, Kofi Annan had displayed Negroponte’s OLPC laptop with a hand crank attached and a new phase in the evolution of computing had begun. However, India did not seem as ready to try One Laptop Per Child as it had been to allow cell phones a decade ago and its education secretary found the pedagogy of learning on laptops suspect. The laptop got into production by the end of 2007. Jha changed the strategy to focus on the state Governments as the Indian Ministry of Education has been engaged with its idea of developing an indigenous $10 laptop that failed to get traction and has now given way to a $35 laptop. Jha questioned that India had no track record of having created any product as yet to come up with anything that belonged to next generation and still offered the Government of India all support in realizing the dream to create a laptop cheaper than OLPC's. Meanwhile several state governments in India, Manipur, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Himachal among them,have endorsed OLPC as their education strategy as the Union Minister has announced that the cheaper laptop will be made available to university students instead of rural schools.
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