Girls learn on the computer at the SOS Social Center Nagapattinam, in India

July 27, 2010: The Indian government has introduced a $35 computer whose price, it says, will eventually drop to $10, according to CNN.

Presenting a prototype of the computer on July 22, the Ministry of Human Resources Development stated that the government’s goal is to make affordable devices available to students at colleges and universities “and to provide these institutions a host of choices of low-cost access devices in the near future."

With a literacy rate of almost 73 percent in 2009, India has yet to reach the level of its neighbor China, whose literacy rate is more than 90 percent. Expanding Internet access for students through tools like an affordable computer is part of a much larger effort to overhaul India’s education system.

Part of that ambitious plan includes crafting policies to enable greater numbers of women and disadvantaged students to obtain a college education.

SOS Provides Education to India’s Girls and Other Young People in Need

A girl watches her sister reading at SOS Children's Villages - Visakhapatnam, in India

India has a growing middle class whose families have the wherewithal to send their children to school, but many children in India remain poor, malnourished, and unable to attend school. Plans to expand education to reach such children are noteworthy but will take time.

SOS Children’s Villages has operated in India for 40 years educating the boys and girls without parental care who live inside its Villages. SOS schools also teach local children who would otherwise remain illiterate.

With 39 Children’s Villages across India, SOS runs kindergartens, schools, and vocational training centers that prepare children for jobs and economic independence. Some SOS-educated children go on to higher levels of education. In its own way, SOS is contributing to India’s goal of broadening domestic educational opportunities for young people.

SOS Offers a Wide Array of Other Services

Three girls at SOS Villages  - Murtypudukuppam, in India

Education is key to a child’s success, but so too are basic necessities such as a warm home, a full stomach, the love of an SOS mother, and medical care. SOS provides all of these things in its SOS Children’s Villages in India and in 132 countries around the world.

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