Ten years ago an Indian academic knocked a hole through the wall of his laboratory so that children in the adjoining slum could play on one of his computers.

Sugata Mitra’s experiment, to see whether unschooled children would teach themselves how to use the internet, if left to their own devices, was intended as an educational tool.

It has turned out to have had an unexpected impact in Hollywood and has provided a boost to the British film industry. Professor Mitra learnt this week that his “hole-in-the-wall” project was the inspiration for Slumdog Millionaire, the British film that swept to victory at the Golden Globes and is now the favourite to pick up the Best Picture award at the Oscars.

The film, about a street urchin who reaches the final of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? with knowledge accrued throughout his tough upbringing, may not feature a hole-in-the-wall computer, but the author of the original novel has cited Professor Mitra as his inspiration. Vikas Swarup announced this week that he wrote Q&A, which was adapted for the screen by Simon Beaufoy, as a direct result of hearing about street children using Professor Mitra’s computer.

“I was inspired by the hole-in-the-wall project, where a computer with an internet connection was put in a Delhi slum,” he told India Express. “When the slum was revisited after a month, the children of that slum had learnt how to use the world wide web.”

Professor Mitra, who is now Professor of Educational Technology at the University of Newcastle, told The Times: “It all started more than ten years ago in New Delhi. I had the idea of making a computer accessible to slum children and in order to stop them breaking it I put it in a wall.”

He expanded the project to 23 villages in India where children had never had access to a computer.

“At the end of five years the schools started reporting that their English, maths and science scores were all going up.” There are now about 600 hole-in-the-wall computers around the world.

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