Can Indian Government’s Plan For $35 Tablets For Students Succeed?

Datawind's new Aakash tablet, which the Indian government plans to sell to students at $35.
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A little-known UK electronics company has teamed up with the Indian government to offer a new touchscreen tablet computer for the staggeringly low price of $35 to students and eventually for $60 to anyone throughout the country.

The “Aakash” tablet (translated from Hindi as “Sky”) from DataWind was unveiled on Wednesday in Dehli. It runs Android 2.2, boasts a 7-inch resistive LCD screen, a camera for videoconferencing, Wi-Fi connectivity, 2 GB of memory but up to 32 GB via expandable microSD cards, and even features something the iPad and new Kindle Fire lack: USB ports – 2 of them to be exact.

“We’re very happy with the product,” said DataWind production manager Chao Wang, in a phone interview with TPM on Thursday. “Of course, like everyone, we’re always inspired by Apple and the iPad.”

Indeed, with only a 366 Mhz processor, no access to the Android marketplace, and a 3-hour battery life, it isn’t exactly aiming to compete with the iPad or the Kindle Fire. But it’s only $35! And it’s geared at helping the Indian government achieve its goal of getting 220 million children on the Internet rather than letting techies stream TV shows.

“Today we demonstrate to the world that we will not falter in our resolve to secure our future for our children,” said Kapil Sibal, India’s minister for human resources development, the Wall Street Journal reported. “Let me not limit the achievements of this great enterprise to only our children … this is for all of you who are disempowered.”

As Reuters notes, the number of Internet users in India increased by 15 times between 2000 and 2010. Still, in 2010, only 8.5 percent of the country had access to the Internet, according to Internet World Stats.

The Indian government is hoping to ramp things up by purchasing a first-round order of 100,000 tablets from DataWind at $50 per device. The government will then turn around and subsidize the device to students at $35. It aims to eventually buy and sell 10 million low-cost tablet devices from multiple suppliers over the next several years, RapidTVNews reported.

In 2010, the average annual household income in India was $1,009, according to Indian Web portal Rediff. But as a report from the Indian Statistical Institute noted, due to a variety of factors, household income surveys in India frequently under-estimate the average income, especially in rural areas.

DataWind, best known now for its “PocketSurfer” mobile communicator, partnered with IIT Rajasthan to build the devices in India. DataWind CEO Suneet Singh Tuli even stated that the company could have made the device for cheaper, had it used Chinese manufacturing plants.

“It would have been cheaper to produce the tablet in China, in our existing facility. Manufacturing in India is not easy because of the complicated tax structure, inter-state sales taxes, VAT and other associated costs. … But it was important for this project to have the Made in India tag and despite hurdles we feel it’s been worth it.” he told NDTV

Eventually, the company hopes to market the device to the average consumer in India, the rest of Asia, and Europe under the name “UbiSlate,” for $60. It costs about $39 to make.

Still, the question remains whether it will actually take off. Students who tested the device at its launch complained of its slowness and the fact that the resistive LCD screen required them to push down hard on the screen, making typing difficult.

Previous efforts by the Indian government to spur low-cost technological advances, such as the much-hyped, $2,000 Tato Nano car, haven’t exactly worked out as smoothly as planned, with that product in particular suffering from embarrassing and dangerous spontaneous fires and an inexplicably delayed rollout, testing customers’ patience and eventually driving many away.

Furthermore, there’s already been a failed, high-profile effort to produce dirt-cheap computers for the developing world: The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organization was founded in 2002 by former MIT professor and Wired magazine co-founder Nicholas Negroponte with the goal of creating a $100 hand-powered laptop that could be sold by the millions to the governments of developing nations.

Unfortunately, the effort ran smack into technological and political resistance, couldn’t get its costs under control, and was pronounced a failure, having only delivered 900,000 laptops into the hands of children by 2009.

And yet, that very same year, an undaunted OLPC embarked on a still-ongoing effort to develop a tablet it aims to sell for $75.

Called the XO-3, the device would run Linux and is reportedly on track to be unveiled by the end of 2012, according to the latest update from the organization. So it’s little wonder OLPC India CEO Satish Jha, would openly criticize the Aakash to the blog Boy Genius Report.

“That tablet is for colleges and urban areas, it doesn’t address any of the questions the OLPC addressed – the underprivileged kids,” Jha said. “It has no ambition to give education at all. It is just a cheap device, an access device. It is a consumption device not an educational, creative or production device.”

Whatever happens, there’s no denying these efforts to bridge the “digital divide” are ambitious and will at least contribute to the development of more affordable devices overall. Check out video of the new Aakash below.


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