Tuesday, June 21, 2011
O Tablet, My Tablet: Sakshat, India's $35 tablet
Five years ago, the then education secretary thought of taking on Nicholas Negroponte's $100 laptop. One and a half years after his demise,this June, HRD Minister Kapil Sibal unveiled a Rs 1500 ($35) laptop. But what is it actually??
This project was initially a drive to provide technology based education to rural children,. This along with cheap internet was supposed to help farmers find out about weather, fertilizers, proper, communicate with other farmers and fix the selling price of their product. This was the project Project Simputer(started in 2000-01). [The very second post of this blog was on the Simputer.] I spent my 2009 summer in IITG working on one of these local language speech recognition projects under Dr. P.K. Das. No idea what happened to it. :(
Back to Shakshat. This 7" LCD resistive touchscreen tablet is powered by an Android OS and has all basic functionality lik
As a part of India’s National Mission for Education, Information and Communication Technology (NMEICT) 504 universities and 25,000 colleges countrywide would be the recipients of these laptops. [Not sure, it might also be institutes of the sub-continent]
10,000 Sakshat tablets will be shipped to IIT Jaipur by June-end, and in four months 90, 000 units will be distributed among other IITs. Nevertheless it is interesting to see how something aimed at the farmers and their children, ultimately ends up in the top colleges of the country. I sure hope that a few of these are siphoned out and sold in the grey market! Cheers!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)