Lucknow:
The Akhilesh Yadav-led Samajwadi Party government in Uttar Pradesh completes its first year in office on Friday. When he was campaigning across the state, Mr Yadav expended much of his time and energy on young people, promising them free computers and tablets if they voted for him. Today, 10,000 students from colleges in Lucknow received their laptops from the 39-year-old Chief Minister.
Azher Rizvi, a first year MBBS student from the King George's Medical University, is one of the students who got a free laptop today. He already owns a laptop, and does not mind his new one having Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav's wallpaper on its desktop.
Here's what Mr Rizvi has to say about his new laptop:When the free laptop scheme was first announced last year, we didn't take it very seriously as we thought it was quite impossible to distribute free laptops to every student in the whole state who passes class 12, with the number of students running in tens of lakhs. But the government has really accomplished the impossible today.
When the form distribution began in our university around February 20, I was astonished. I couldn't believe that this was really happening. Our expectations were not much because we had read in the newspaper that the laptop will be worth only around Rs 25,000. Also, the newspaper report said that the laptop would have a pre-installed wallpaper of the chief minister and his father, with the logo "
waade hote pure". We didn't find anything wrong with this as the political party has the right to at least brag about this massive project.
Then arrived the day when we would be actually receiving the laptops, March 11. At the function, the chief minister mentioned in his speech that people were sceptical about this scheme and now that the day of the laptop distribution finally arrived, he was shutting up all criticising mouths.
As soon as we reached our hostel we checked our laptops. We were not disappointed. The laptop had all the necessary features. It was not much different than the usual laptops. It had a 14 inch screen, a dual core processor and a pre-installed genuine Windows 7 operating system. Additionally, there were several education based software. We couldn't complain. It was beyond our expectations. On top of that we could remove the party's wallpaper and set up our own. Even for those users who have never operated a laptop before, the manual provided would come in quite handy.
Overall the experience was quite good. I am satisfied with the laptop and so far I haven't faced any problems operating it. These laptops will be very useful to us. It will be a relief from the present book-based curriculum which is being followed because now we can search any videos or software on the internet related to the topics we study. This will make our course both interesting and easy to understand. Apart from that, the laptop will be of much entertainment value as well.
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