Opinion Reaching the last person

That’s a big question. It is why,one year ago,the HRD ministry put out a very specific proposal that Kalra and his IIT decided to take up,when no one else would: Could someone design and make a stripped-down iPad-like,Internet-enabled,wirelessly connected tablet that the poorest Indian family,saving about $2.50 a month for a year,could afford? Last month,Kalra’s team — led by two IIT electrical engineering professors,one of whom comes from a village that still has no electricity — unveiled the Aakash tablet.

If Indians could only purchase tablets made in the West,the price points would be so high they’d never spread here,said Kalra,so “we had to break the price point” in a big way. They did it by taking full advantage of today’s hyperconnected world: pulling commodity parts mainly from China and South Korea,using open-source software and collaboration tools and employing the design/manufacturing/assembly abilities of two companies in the West and one in India.

The Aakash is a ray of hope that India can leverage technology to get more of its 220 million students enough tools to escape poverty and poor teaching,but it’s also a challenge to the West.

In terms of hope,I was struck by a story Kalra’s wife,Urmila,told about a chat she had had with their maid after Aakash was unveiled on October 5. Her maid,who has two young children,said she had heard “from the night watchman Mr Kalra has made a computer that is very cheap,and is so cheap even she can afford to buy it. The watchman had given her a picture from the paper,and she asked me if it was true.”

Urmila told her it was true and that the machine was meant for people who could not afford a big computer. “ ‘What can you do on it?’ she asked me. I said,‘If your daughter goes to school,she can use it to download videos of class lessons,’ just like she had seen my son download physics lectures every week from MIT. She just kept getting wider- and wider-eyed. Then she asked me will her kids be able to learn English on it. I said,‘Yes,they will definitely be able to learn English… It will be so cheap you will be able to buy one for your son and one for your daughter!’ ”

That conversation is the sound of history changing.

And not just for India. We’re at the start of a nonlinear move in innovation thanks to the hyperconnecting of the world which is putting cheap innovation devices into the hands of so many more people,enabling them to collaborate on invention is so many new ways. This Great Inflection will be an opportunity and a challenge for every worker and company because we’re going to see more and more product “price points” broken in big ways.

And that explains why Kalra tells recruiters for major companies to stay away from his campus. He wants his Indian students to think about inventing their first jobs,not applying for them. “I want them to start companies and become CEOs of their own. It is the only way we can catch China,” he says. India can’t wait for the world to solve India’s problems at India’s price points. It has to invent them. It now has tools to do so. This is about to get interesting.