Microsoft in Lakshadweep

When I was doing my B.E, I heard that M$ is coming to Lakshadweep to teach computers to school children. Now they are there, advertising there products in this group of small islands.

As far as I know, the computer literacy rate is very low in Lakshadweep. Most of the students are not even aware of what a computer is. You can say that most of them haven't seen it. In the early stage of my adventure with computers, I learned Unix, DOS, WordStar, Lotus 123, Dbase, FoxPro, etc.. They were the best those days and I never heard about Microsoft's Word, Excel, Access at all. I was able to understand that DOS and Unix are Operating Systems, WordStar is a word processor, Lotus 123 is a spreadsheet, Dbase and Foxpro are database management systems (DBMS). Now when M$ is going to feed students about computers, they will only learn Word, Excel, Access. They can't even realise that there are wonderful softwares, which fall into various categories as that of Word, Excel and Access. They can't even compare M$ applications with others, since M$ might have framed the syllabus so carefully that students will only learn about their products. When students get out of school, they will only be aware of internet as a combination of Windows and Internet Explorer. It is the weakness of the education department not to learn more about the environment and frame a better syllabus, which is much more generalised and covers more information. And it is their weakness to avoid a product based company to creep into the education system. This will only malign the system and also question the freedom of students.

There was only a single machine in my school, when I was studying. Now there are around 30 Pentium PCs. All these machines will be now running Windows as operating system and basic applications from M$ like Word, Excel, Access, etc.. All these basic applications come as a single package, M$ Office. The education department might have spent money for 30 M$ Office suite and Windows. May be after two to three years the department has to spent some more moeny for the latest or upgraded version because of lack of support for old versions from M$. They could have reduced the cost through much more cheaper approach. Free softwares like Linux and OpenOffice.org, Mozilla Firefox, etc. could have reduced the cost to far extend.

Now M$ bug is in the system with its propoganda, it is too late to do something. Can we remove this bug anyhow? When will the resposible people identify this trap? Are these people involved in this business?