College students to get Aakash 2 from Feb

Datawind agrees to supply enhanced tablet after government threatened to withdraw order. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Jan 16, 2012, 21:28:32 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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College students across India will get an enhanced version of Aakash tablet without the government having to pay a penny extra.

The Aakash 2 tablet will three times faster than Aakash 1 and will have 50 % more battery life. The latest version will have to pass a new quality protocol prepared on basis of inputs received from about 600 students of Indian Institutes of Technology and other engineering colleges.

"All issues have been resolved. The much improved 70,000 Aakash tablet will be received from Datawind (the company supplying the tablets) by end of January," said a senior HRD ministry official on Friday, a day after reports of the ministry deciding to put its agreement with Datawind on hold.

The HRD ministry had asked Datawind of Montreal based Suneet S Tuli to supply one lakh Aakash tablets at about US 50 dollars. Of the initial lot, 600 tablets were given to students for testing.

The Indian Institute of Technology, Rajasthan, which had prepared the prototype of Aakash cited several deficiencies in the tablet including short battery life, the processor unable to handle multiple operations at the same time and poor picture quality.

Datawind had already supplied 30,000 tablets by the time IIT, Rajasthan report came. The ministry held-back the order and asked the company to improve Aakash as per the deficiencies citied by the IIT report.

Ministry sources said that company was initially reluctant to upgrade the tablet without increasing the cost. However, the company agreed when ministry officials threatened to cancel the order.

Tuli was not available for comments but a company spokesperson said the product manufactured to date has met and exceeded all the specifications, features and criteria specified in the government tender.

"The product road-map and future enhancements are not 'news' and not a sign of failure," the company said in a statement.

"Not only Aakash from Datawind but all future tablets will have minimum Aakash 2 specificians," said N K Sinha, additional secretary in the HRD ministry. These improvements included a 240 minute battery instead of 180 minutes, better firmware and a 700 mega hertz (MHz) Cortex A8 processor instead of the 366 MHz ARM 11 processor.

The HRD ministry is expected to invite bids from companies to supply Aakash 2. The target is to provide about a million Aakash tablets to college students in the next few years.

Datawind has already got two million booking for enhanced Aakash tablet, sold under the brand name of Ubislate, for which it sought online booking earlier this month. The tablet is being sold at Rs 2,999, which is Rs 749 more than price of Aakash for HRD ministry.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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