Subsistence or knowledge? Get it right

Here's a blog entry about the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child project) XO - J5's blog. What impressed me more was this comment by Giacomo, reproduced hereunder without permission:

This post is the best answer to all those who criticized this project because you should’ve spent the money in food and medical aids instead of laptops.
Those children don’t eat grass nor drink muddy water from a well 10 km away from their homes.
Their experience is not so different from the experience of my mother in the ’50s here in Italy, there were jobs, homes, the basic services were guaranteed, but there wasn’t too much money for the rest.
This project can bring to those children what otherwise they’re going to miss the most in this century: knowledge and access to the rest of the world.

People have been criticizing the OLPC and similarly-motivated projects on cynical premises such as there being a greater need to provide access to safe drinking water, or food, or employment, or medicines. However, I do not know if these very people ever participated in any project or donated to it that provided these very means, leave alone knowledge.

It may be said that the poor are poor because they are trapped in a vicious circle and they do not have any means to break it. I will say that access to knowledge provides them a means to break this circle by showing them that an alternative future exists and by showing them a path to reach it.

The OLPC can open up poor and rural children's horizons, and it need not necessarily be an option to safe water, food or health care. Rather than these, money spent on an OLPC can easily be tracked to its end use. The OLPC can be a force multiplier by sowing the seed of a quest for knowledge in these children. It can go beyond the results demonstrated by the Hole In the Wall project.

It is a pity that India has rejected the OLPC, and although there was a lot of hype about the simputer, it never got more than a honorary mention in the media.