The $35 Tablet Computer

Online, October 18, 2011 (Newswire.com) - Technology doesn't come cheap. India introduced a $35 tablet computer for the rural poor, in order to deliver technology at the rural doorsteps. The tablet computer is named "Akash" or "Sky" and is the latest in the series of one of the cheapest innovations made in India. Among other cheap innovations that the vastly poor country came up with recently was the Tata Nano, which would cost a lakh rupee. To add to the list there is the $15 water purifier and an open heart surgery for $ 2,000.

The developing company - Datawind is selling these to the Indian Government at $45 and will be available to the poor at subsidized rates of $35. This is a tough competition to the efforts of Amazon, which launched its Kindle Fire recently priced at $199 against the Apple tablet for $ 499.

Presently Datawind looks at a monthly figure of about 100,000 tablets, which is actually insufficient to meet the need of getting 220 Indian children Online. Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal said that this was not for his generation but for all the children of the world.

There are thousands of Indians are still deprived of basic things like electricity and the rural areas are deprived of access to advancing technologies; this has initiated the Indian authorities to take immediate actions. The company was actually looking at a $10 tablet but it wasn't successful. Nevertheless this one has a colored screen and can allow video conferencing as well as enable word processing.

People laughed, people called us lunatics," ministry official Mr. N.K. Sinha said. "They said we are taking the nation for a ride."

India has moved up the literacy ladder from bare 12% to 78% since the exit of the British Rule, it now envisions a 30% enrollment in higher education by the year 2020. Sibal distributed around 650 tablets to the students and asked them to aim for the sky.