World’s cheapest tablet Aakash to be out today

They set up a production line in Secunderabd and now 700 units are being manufactured everyday. Slowly,the numbers will increase as the government wants to provide 12 million students the tablet where they can download educational material.

“As economies of scale set in,the cost will reduce further. There are ways to do it,” Suneet Singh Tuli,the chief executive of the company,said.

“The whole world is trying to make a $100 laptop. This shows it can be done and it can be done in India,which everyone thought was impossible. There are different ways to doing that. One is to manufacture your own components and by monetising the services. Sell value-added services like Google does. I am not saying the price will reduce tomorrow. But it can be done. Google has shown interest. I have written to them,too. The government wants to spur the industry and Google is showing keen interest in supporting it,” he said.

Even though the much touted $100 laptop announced by the former Union Minister of Human Resource Development Arjun Singh in 2009 never took off,the government is all set to launch the $35 tablet,heralded as the world’s cheapest. While the cost has escalated to $49 that includes shipping and other costs,the device is still being referred to as the $35 tablet.

When the first 500 students get the tablet,which is now priced at Rs 2,276 or $49 because of specifications added later like a 2GB SD card that the MHRD insisted on besides the internal memory,and the shipping and distribution cost,the process would have just begun.

The aim is to lower the price till it hits $10.

This is part of the National Mission on Education’s Sakshat project,which has a three-fold purpose — to create broadband and link higher-education institutes in the country,to create open source material from IITs so that students from institutes in remote and rural locations can access lectures,and provide the Aakash tablet to all students in the country at a subsidized price.