It's time we chucked the Aakash tablet in the bin
There is something peculiar about the human resource development ministry's Aakash project. It doesn't make sense from any angle. Irrespective of however you slice it, it looks like a project that is doomed to fail. It cannot work. And yet, the Indian government just can't seem to forget about it and move on.
After repeated failures, the government is now thinking of reviving the project. There are reports that HRD ministry officials want better specifications for the tablet and want to bring it to the market.
The government has spent crores of rupees on the Aakash project. All for naught. And the officials don’t seem to realise the mistakes they are making by clinging to it.
Firstly, the way the project had been conceived was all wrong. It was conceived by babus in the ministry, who might have had a grand vision, but had no idea about tablet manufacturing. In fact, there is a possibility that the project was created out of ego. The Indian government refused to join Nicholas Negroponte's $100 laptop project even when many developing countries agreed. Instead, the government claimed it would create an even cheaper computing device. With the iPad proving to be a hit in 2010, the government jumped on the tablet bandwagon and pushed its $35 dream against Negroponte's laptop.
But I won't digress.
When the Indian government came out with the tablet in 2011 and Kapil Sibal, then HRD minister, showed it in Delhi, I reached out to iSuppli, a research firm that tracked tablet component market. The verdict from iSuppli (the firm is now known as IHS Technologies) was that a decent and viable $35 tablet wasn't possible.
"The main components, even if one takes the cheapest options, will cost around $29. Case, components for Wi-Fi, charger and manufacturing will cost another $18 to $25," a senior iSuppli executive said.
And iSuppli was right. When DataWind won the contract to manufacture Aakash tablets, it did so by agreeing to supply each tablet for a price of around $50 and not $35. The government agreed to pay half of it while students/institutions supposed to use the tablets were required to pay a little over Rs 2,000 for each unit. (Interestingly for a government of India project, the first few Aakash tablets were actually cheap, rebranded tablets that Datawind allegedly bought from China).
It gets even murkier from here. The lead for the Aakash project was IIT Jodhpur. Curiously, even though Datawind bagged the contract to supply Aakash, the officials at IIT Jodhpur were not happy about it. They wanted another desi firm to get the contract. It is not clear if it was unwillingness on the part of IIT officials or just plain poor quality of the initial Aakash tablets that the device totally bombed during its pilot phase. The IIT students who used it as part of the pilot project found it utterly useless and, in most cases, faulty.
Datawind's CEO Suneet Singh Tuli told me two years ago that IIT officials "jeopardized the whole project" and that they used "dirty tricks".
Long story short: Datawind was supposed to supply one lakh units of the Akaksh tablet. It supplied 10,000. Most of them remained unused.
After that, there were reports that IIT Jodhpur officials were taken off the project and IIT Mumbai officials were brought in. In the meantime, the HRD ministry talked about revising hardware for Aakash.
But when the government changed this year, we hoped that the Aakash project was finally gone for good. But just like many other not-so-logical policies of the earlier government, the Modi sarkar is keeping Aakash alive.
Unfortunately, Aakash is a project that can't succeed. Even if the government comes up with this magical tablet for a price of Rs 2,000 somehow, it won't serve any purpose because most schools in the country don't have Wi-Fi. Leave alone Wi-Fi, most schools in the country don't get even regular electricity supply and probably lack provision for safe drinking water, too.
It is also unnecessary. It is not the government's job to manufacture tablets, especially in 2014 when decent (and cheap) tablets/e-reading devices are already available. If the government wants to do something to modernise education, it should first focus on creating modern infrastructure in schools. It can create an infrastructure for e-delivery of content and education services. It can create infrastructure to allow students to download free study material from a central repository. It can even create policies that will push or motivate companies like Google, Samsung, Apple and others to create e-classrooms or devices that are cheap enough for students.
The big vision. That is what we expect from the government.
Chasing after a cheap tablet, which is not feasible, is something that the government should not be doing. It is a waste of money -- the money that we pay the government in the form of taxes.