Aakash, the world’s cheapest tablet, is the computer for masses, says Suneet Singh Tuli, CEO of its Montreal-based manufacturing company Datawind. This low cost tablet can be a game changer for India’s digital have- nots. But without proper planning ‘Aakash’ may just turn out to be another dud from the government.
Whatever one may say, but this tablet is a promising gizmo. Its features- a resistive touchscreen, an SD card slot fitted with a 2GB card and supportable up to 32GB, two USB ports, Wi-Fi, video conferencing, 3 hour battery life, 600Mhz processor, 256 Mb ram and Android 2.2- are enough to dazzle India on the wrong side of the digital divide.
No doubt India has succeeded in creating the world’s cheapest tablet. No doubt this tablet has the potential of being the game changer as it can empower India’s poor- Just the way PC did in the West in 1980s .But it will be a big mistake to confuse potential with performance. The tablet cannot do anything alone. The government needs to invest in many other sectors such as rural electrification and Wi-Fi connectivity to make Aakash work. With even the Capital’s satellite towns facing power cuts, can anyone guess how the tablet with just 3 hour battery life work and be recharged in rural areas that get power for just a couple of hours a day. It is like we can’t just dump technology on rural communities and hope it will work. The fact that the tablet connects to the internet with Wi-Fi alone could be a bigger problem. Even big cities in India have just a few Wi-Fi hotspots and outside them, the service vanishes. So, the users in India will have to wait for 4G technology that will offer wireless internet the same way mobile phone operators provide wireless telephony service. But that will raise the question of billing as the 4G business model hasn’t been made public yet. And if, by some means, these problems are solved then AAKASH is the cheapest tablet, but what about the bill of Wi-Fi services which will can raise the money to handy sum of around Rs.1500? Will the poor be able to pay so much or the government is going to provide free Wi-Fi services?
Many questions have been ignored about the AAKASH and have raised doubts about its success, particularly when the government is yet to come out with the distribution scheme of the tablet, because the distribution of technology is not the problem which rural India faces. It seems that it is just a tool for the rural society to connect them to a world which they needn’t know and the knowledge which they require is being ignored.
Actually, nothing can be said. It may be successful or not. Many such cases have taken place. For instance in May 2005, a Rs.10000 mobile computer, called mobilis, was launched. “This marks India’s leap into the future of PC technology…” the then minister for Science and Technology had said at that time. And today nobody knows about mobilis, it is history now. So to make AAKASH successful, the Government will have to do much more than just make it sound like a futuristic missile
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