Most Indians pride themselves on using their brains especially being blessed with mathematical skills. Many people I know in India can do mental arithmetic by themselves as efficient as a calculator. India has also produced several mathematicians and chess Grandmasters. Also people in India are taught to live without than with something for adaptability reasons. If you can live without a bed and are capable of sleeping on the floor, you can always adjust to a soft bed later on, but its much harder vice versa. We should not lose our in-built abilities/conditioning due to our usage of tools. Its this psyche that probably makes them rely on the self first. For example if you had to do an important task and rely heavily on the laptop and the net and then at a crucial moment you experience a power failure/battery down (a common occurrence here), a self reliant person can still find a way but a gadget reliant person maybe lost. However the laptop IMO can be introduced as a tool like a notebook/pen that we can use if needed after a certain level of "old school" education.