For students: Faster Aakash at no extra cost

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

Updated on: Jan 17, 2012, 01:38:31 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 around 600 students of IITs and engineering colleges.

“All issues have been resolved. We will receive 70,000 improved Aakash tablets from Datawind (the company supplying the tablets) by January-end,” said HRD minister Kapil Sibal, after reports of the ministry planning to put its pact with Datawind on hold.

Ministry officials said Datawind may not get order in future as it had violated the contract condition of providing the tablets first to the government before selling it in open market.

The HRD ministry had asked Datawind of Montreal-based Suneet S Tuli to supply one lakh Aakash tablets for around $50 each. In the initial lot, 600 tablets were given to students for testing.

IIT, Rajasthan, which had prepared the Aakash prototype cited several deficiencies in the tablet including short battery life, processor unable to handle multiple operations at a time and poor picture quality.

Datawind has already supplied 30,000 tablets by the time the report by the IIT came. The ministry held back the order and asked the firm to fix the deficiencies. Ministry sources said the company was initially reluctant to upgrade the tablet without increasing the cost. However, it agreed when ministry threatened to cancel the order.

Tuli was not available for comments. A company spokesperson said the remaining 70,000 tablets would be supplied as per the pact. “Not only Aakash from Datawind but all future tablets will have minimum Aakash 2 specifications,” said NK Sinha, additional secretary, 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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