85 Romanian politicians still resist the OLPC project

Back in July I was writing how the Information and Technology Minister, Mr. Zsolt Nagy, was expressing a negative opinion about a project which would bring 5 million 100$ dollar laptops to Romania.

Back then, the Minister proved he didn’t do his basic homework in regard to this project. But it wasn’t his place to ultimately decide what happens to the project. It needs to pass through the Chamber of Deputies (where it was regarded favorably) and through the Senate, which rejected it.

Once again, [Romanian] the Romanian deputies show off their computer illiteracy, their lack of information pertinent to the case, and, possibly, their bias towards the commercial interests of companies such as Intel and Microsoft.

Deputy Ioan Ghişe (National Liberal Party — PNL) publicly expressed his suspicion that the Ministry of Communications is directly interested in these matters, and that the minister has promised to Intel and Microsoft to support their continued presence on the Romanian market.

Deputy Damian Florea (Conservative Party — PC) claimed that the project belongs to SciFi, that there are only 10 such laptops in existance in the world at this point and that mass production is scheduled to begin in 2008.

Which is wrong, and a simple visit to the One Laptop Per Child website would’ve cleared this misconception along with others which have been expressed by other deputies.

Lia Olguţa Vasilescu (Great Romania Party — PRM), deputy as well as the head of the Education Comittee, has objected that the 100$ laptops have a single producer, a fact which she claims to be opposed to the guidelines suggested by the European Union. A sad and sorry statement, in a country where even big government-level aquisitions are often settled through fat bribes which see that the “right” companies get the projects.

Ioan Ghişe along with professor Adrian Popescu (from the Politechnical University of Bucharest) have estimated the total cost of the program to $700 mil. (RON 1.82 bil.), which would cover the aquisition of 5 million laptops and country-wide wireless Internet connectivity — incidentaly, a major step forward for Romania, where at best only 10% of the population has Internet access, and that’s mostly in the bigger cities.

Ioan Ghişe was counting on €300 mil. (RON 1.02 bil.) left over from the 2006 education investment fund, left unspent as of yet. Deputy Olguţa Vasilescu noted (rather inconsequently) that, of the funds for 2007, about RON 420 mil. will have to be reallocated in order to offer teachers and professors a 22% pay increase instead of 18% as previously decided. Again, it is a dubious statement, considering that the Romanian governments have a long history of stringing the education unions along with plain lies about pay increases, and that the unions are forced to organize strikes every year.

Finally, there’s also the good old (terribly misinformed) objection stating that these laptops are just “toys” and that the students cannot use them efficiently or for long periods of time. Once again, the one who made the statement is PRM deputy, Olguţa Vasilescu.

Since the Senate rejection the project was sent back [Romanian] to the specialty comittees of the Chamber of Deputies, where the Education, Science, Youth and Sports Comission has advised it favorably at the beginning of December. For some reason, however, the project was sent back to the Comission for an “additional report”, and is scheduled to be reviewed again at the middle of February 2007.