A lab that works when the power does not

Go to almost any government high school in Telangana that received computers under a scheme or a CSR project between 2015 and 2020, and you will find them. Usually in a locked room. Usually eight of them. Usually four working. They fail for two boring reasons. The first is power: a desktop that shuts down hard three times in a period will lose a disk within a year, and rural feeders in our districts go down for two to five hours most days between March and June. The second is the warranty: the machines are bought new, from a national vendor, with an on-site warranty that in practice means a service engineer from Hyderabad who will not travel 140 km for one desktop. So we invert both. We buy refurbished business-class desktops — three to four years old, i5, 8 GB, SSD — from a refurbisher in Balanagar who gives us a two-year on-site warranty and, more importantly, will sell us a replacement motherboard for ₹1,800 and talk a local technician through fitting it over the phone. And every lab gets a 2 kVA inverter with four hours of backup, which costs about as much as two of the machines and is the single highest-return line item in the budget. The third thing we do is less obvious: the content lives on a small server in the room, not on the internet. Forty-eight hours of Telugu-medium curriculum, offline. The lab has never once stopped because the line was down, because the line has nothing to do with it. Four labs are running. The oldest, at ZPHS Illanda, was commissioned in March 2023 and has had two hardware failures in twenty-eight months, both fixed locally within a week. That is the number we are actually trying to optimise, and it is not the number that appears in most funding proposals.