Lenovo India offers computing in 12 languages for kids

Lenovo India, a personal computer major, launched a project that offers vernacular computing for school children, at a ceremony at Jawahar Bal Bhavan in Bangalore Friday.

The programme, Matrubhasha, will enable the students to acquire computer proficiency through their mother tongue, without depending on English.

The project is part of Lenovo's commitment to corporate social responsibility and would include donation of 150 brand new Lenovo H series personal computers, pre-installed with a unique vernacular computing software application called LooKeys.

Akshara Foundation's 38 libraries in 35 Kannada government schools and three Urdu government schools across Bangalore would be the beneficiaries in this programme.

''Lenovo aims to break the language barrier and enable children to explore limitless ideas and develop creativity in their mother tongue,'' said Ramprasad Lakshminarayanan, vice president, transactional consumer sales, Lenovo India.

"The Matrubhasha project is a grassroots level initiative, in helping children gain computer literacy so that they're able to put this technological advancement to their education's advantage, without depending on English as a medium," he added.

He said that they hope this advantage exposes them to opportunities that would have otherwise been restricted to English-aware children only.

The LooKeys-enabled Lenovo PCs donated to school libraries will allow children to learn computing programmes in 12 languages - English, Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, Tamil, Kannada, Gujarati, Marathi, Telugu, Malayalam, Konkani and Punjabi.

The children can also use other applications like chat, word processing, power point, emails and browse the Web using the language of their choice as the medium.

This initiative will benefit 20,500 children within these government schools in Bangalore. The school libraries with these Lenovo - LooKeys PCs will commence on March 19, 2009.

Lenovo India employees will commit approximately 3-5 volunteer hours per month to train the librarians in these schools, who in turn will impart computer education to the students. The volunteers and Akshara staff would also regularly monitor the progress of these projects at the schools.

"We are thankful to Lenovo India for gifting an infrastructure at the Akshara libraries, which will provide freedom to the school children to redefine the boundaries of their learning curve,'' said Suzanne Singh, trustee, Akshara Foundation. 

Akshara Foundation, established in 2000, is a Bangalore-based public charitable trust working for the improvement of educational quality, with a mission to provide education to all children. It has hundreds of balwadis in many communities across the state.