I'm not sure whether the elite rich and businesses would foot the bill; if India's rich are anything like those in the United States, they tend to not help the poor unless they are involved in something like a disaster.

The point I don't think I made clear in my original blog post with the $100 laptop being a tool: the monies spent on classrooms and teachers are not the same as those spent on supplies. If more money was spent on classrooms and teachers, would they not buy textbooks for that year?

There are a lot of people who don't have something to eat and a place to sleep, but there are even more who do. The lower middle-class is huge, often-forgotten part of society, who just don't have the money to purchase a normal PC. And if they did, what would they do with it?

A thing that a lot of press ignores about the OLPC $100 laptop is that it's not just hardware, it's content and software as well, a complete electronic learning platform--this is not stuff you'd get without spending thousands of dollars or a huge amount of time if you just went down to your local compuer store. The OLPC $100 laptop could be considered more a "gadget," it's designed to perform a specific task and run specific software very well. It's not meant to be used the same way as conventional laptops in industrialized countries use them, which is probably why industrialized countries at this point are not a target for the device.