India has mandated compulsory education for all children from age 6 to 14. Thus, primary education for children is a basic right by law in India now.

There is a huge digital divide between the well-to-do educated Indians and the millions who stay in rural India. It is the duty of the citizens as well as Corporate India to support the basic right to education for all children.

OLPC (One Laptop per child) is an ambituous non-profit initiative to educate under-privileged children around the world. In India, while there has been few initiatives, there is not much large scale adoption.

Lack of educational digital content in local languages is one of the key problems. One of the volunteer projects that we have initiated is digitizing primary school textbooks taught using the medium of local Indian languages.

The idea is simple. In the initial phase, we will gather all primary school textbooks in major Indian languages and scan (digitize) them. The digitized versions can be then used in schools either on an OLPC XO computer or a regular school computer.

In the subsequent phase, we plan to target secondary school textbooks.

The languages are : Hindi, Marathi, Gujarathi, Kanada, Telugu, Bengali, Punjabi, Oriya, Urdu, Kashmiri, Assamese, Malayalam, Tamil (the syllabus is changing so this is on hold) and any other language.

The scanning facilities for the textbooks has been generously provided by M.Soundara Pandian (of eAccess) in Chennai.

This effort is supported by OLPC volunteers and the alumni of PUMBA. PUMBA (Management school at Pune University) makes its students to do Social Projects as part of hands-on learning of Corporate Social Responsibility.

We need help for the following:

1. You can sponsor purchase and mailing costs of textbooks of one language. (Average cost Rs. 2000 or approx $50)
2. We also need volunteers who can actually go and make the purchase and mail the textbooks. We will reimburse them for the cost of purchase and mailing.

You can donate by Paypal using this website.

Any excess donations will be used to fund the second phase of digitizing the secondary school textbooks.

If you would like to help or have any questions, please send email to digitize.textbooks <at> gmail <dot> com