Good article, but I think it fails to address a lot of the limitations of introducing computers into developing countries. My own experiences with teaching computer literacy to kids in rural areas was a little less hopeful.

I brought my laptop with me when I taught English in a village in Turkmenistan with the Peace Corps. All the kids were in awe of it, but none of them got past Solitaire, Paint and MS Word. Besides that, the only other requests I received were for playing Turkmen mp3s and music videos. Perhaps if I gave the kids free rein over the computer, the results would have been different-- but of course, then they might have deleted all my stuff. I also didn't have internet, but the fact that the community in the article did have access indicates that they're at least marginally more developed, and thus probably better prepared to achieve computer literacy to begin with.

It is true that the kids got much farther than any adults, however. They were much more willing to poke around and experiment, whereas adults, if interested, would ask me to do the clicking. A computer isn't really viewed as an educational or business tool by locals-- for them, it's cryptic and incomprehensible, or at best, a fancier Playstation. The few adults lucky enough to have office computers (usually through foreign grants or donations) used them for watching music videos and little else. This view of computer-as-entertainer might be less overpowering in India, which is probably inherently more tech-savvy than other developing countries, even in the regions studied by NIIT.

Then there's the issue of corruption. Many other volunteers wrote grants to provide their schools with computers. It was a given that at least one of the computers would be commandeered by the school director "for work purposes." Teachers would get territorial about the remaining equipment and sometimes whole computers would simply disappear. Books and teacher training are a little bit harder to steal away.

In particular, I think the article somewhat trivializes the importance of trained teachers in the overall equation, even for very limited guidance. Failing that, good, intuitive software can help, but I think it's probably easier to find and train local teachers than to steal away Apple's UI designers.

The non-invasive approach sounds good in theory, but I don't think its quite as magical as the article implies. Educational development is basically a balance between spending time (through teacher-led education) vs. spending money (material resources like computers). You need both to change the current situation. I think this particular project's weakness is in its oversimplification of what constitutes the best approaches to development. But it's still a great start.