Aakash Tablet – India help poor rural population get access to computers:
With a drive to help people still living in rural areas in India, the government with the aid of an Indian manufacturing team called Datawind, have developed a cut price tablet that should be available to people in rural areas at a subsidised 100,000 Rupees or $45 each.
India starting to become kings of cut price:
With such a huge population to tap into and a growing knowledge base to utilise, India are the less discussed China in many ways.
What India do perhaps slightly differently though is to try to improve on a commercial basis the lives for its many inhabitants by way of low cost goods such as cars (the Nano), water purifiers and other services that the west take for granted, and usually pay high prices for.
India is making a real effort to try to improve the quality of its own inhabitants with domestic products such as these tablet computers.
Aakash Tablet:
The tablet will be named Aakash or “Sky” in Hindi, the developer behind the product is called Datawind who sell to the Indian government for $45 and then the tablet gets subsidised for students and teachers to around $35.
Datawind claim to be able to produce around 100,000 tablets per month currently which will not be enough to meet current demand or of India’s dream of providing its 220 million children with access to the internet.
Human Resources Development Minister Kapil Sibal said this about the achievements.
“This is not just for us. This is for all of you who are dis-empowered,” he said. “This is for all those who live on the fringes of society.”
India still faces huge education issues
With the amount of people achieving basic literacy improving from around 12% under British rule to around 78% in current times, the fact remains that India still has a largely uneducated workforce and population as a whole.
This landmark technological breakthrough and empowerment aims to get one step closer to two main goals for the Indian government.
1 – Focusing on higher education with a goal of 30 percent enrolment by the year 2020.
2 – To ensure that as many children gain access sot the Internet as soon as possible.
3 – To start a tablet price war for the benefit of consumers worldwide.
Ministry official N.K. Sinha said.
“People laughed, people called us lunatics, they said we are taking the nation for a ride.”
With a $10 target not reached the Aakash still provides features such as word processing, video conferencing and Web browsing. 7-inch touch screen, Wi-fi, 3G, with 2 USB ports and 256 megabytes of RAM. Unsurprisingly the tablet is not solar powered as many would have hoped, considering India’s power issues in rural areas and beyond, but for India in 2011 this is a start and a pretty big one.
Datawind CEO Suneet Singh Tuli said of the $10 target,
“let’s dream and go in that direction. Let’s start with that target and see what happens,” he said.
Current limitations:
The tablet is nigh in useless for teaching most children currently with pre designed lectures, IIT Guwahati director Gautam Barua told The Indian Telegraph.
“There is hardly any e-content for school students. The biggest challenge will be to develop e-content for school students in vernacular. Once we develop such courses, the device can be utilised properly,”
Though I see potential in simply getting Indian children online as this is how many young people globally now learn, and what they learn is down to what they can get their hands on and what interests them….
Cyber Threat Imminent?
Shashank Kumar, 21, a computer engineering student from Jodhpur, Bihar, said,
“A person learns quite fast when they have a computer at home, in just a few years people can even become hackers.”
It appears that the world is slowly but surely getting connected to the WWW….We Wonder What lies ahead!
Anthony Munns