He delicately placed his finger on the touchscreen. It lit up,Ankit Kumars fingers jumping from one icon to the other. Aakash the worlds cheapest tablet computer was,he mumbled,a dream machine. The retail price for the 7 resistive touchscreen device finally works out to Rs 2,276,which is about $50. Kumar was among the 500 students from across the country given the access device today as part of field test trials. After testing its working under different climates and usage conditions,the students will return Aakash with their feedbacks in 45 days to the government,which will accordingly work out the improvements needed. I want to test it for downloading educational material, said 21-year-old Kumar,a first-year MBA student at Dayalbagh Educational Institute in Agra,from where 55 students came. I like how it looks. I dont have a laptop. I can take it to college. Social networking sites and You Tube are also high on his list. Developed by IIT-Rajasthan and the Union Ministry of Human Resource Development,the tablets are an improved and a lighter version from the one that had gone to the institute for testing. Aakash will ensure that digital illiteracy is vanquished, Union HRD Minister Kapil Sibal said today,launching the tablet,saying they had proved sceptics wrong. Today we see the beginning of a dream that has been realised. The tablet was not just for students of India but children across the world,he added. Officials said Indonesia and Ecuador had already expressed interest. As part of the National Mission on Educations Rs 700-crore Sakshat project,the tablets will be distributed to around 12 million college students across the country so that they can access open source lectures and other educational literature developed at premier institutes like IITs. While the government is subsidising the cost of the tablet,students will have to pay around Rs 1,500 each. Each state will be given 3,300 devices and there are about 95 coordinators to train the students in its usage. The current price of Aakash includes shipping and an additional SD card. The aim is to reduce the price to about $10 as economies of scale set in and more innovation takes place. Datawind,a Canada-based company that won the contract to build the laptop,has set up a manufacturing unit in Securderabad with a capacity of 700 units a day. Orders for one lakh units have already been placed. Datawind will also release a commercial version in November under the brand name UbiSlate and priced at Rs 3,000. There is also a plan to give the device to schools students between Classes IX-XII under the Twelfth Five Year Plan. My message to everyone is to aim for the sky and beyond, Sibal said.
