As the UPA government celebrated nine years of rule on Wednesday, the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) stepped in to fix one of its biggest failures – the Aakash project.
The project, aimed at providing low-cost tablet computers to the masses, has made no headway after the then HRD minister Kapil Sibal unveiled it in 2011. On Wednesday, principal secretary to the prime minister, Pulok Chatterjee, called a meeting with officials of the HRD and IT ministries to know the progress on the project and to decide it’s fate.
The PMO had first written to both the ministries about the statue of the project on May 15.
The scheme to provide tablets at Rs 2,750 has almost been dead since Sibal’s exit from the HRD ministry. Singed by repeated failure in procuring the first one lakh units of the tablet from Canada-based manufacturer Datawind, the ministry, currently headed by MM Pallam Raju, admitted that Aakash had failed to take off. Datawind finally delivered one lakh tablets in May after a delay of one-and-a-half years.
Consequently, the ministry has been dragging its feet on the project and hasn’t moved a cabinet note to float a tender for the next 55 lakh units.
“We don’t want to put the cart before the horse. We want to first seek feedback on the performance of the units delivered by Datawind and then take a call on moving the cabinet note procuring the next 55 lakh units,” said a senior HRD ministry official.
Launched with much fan-fare to bridge the digital divide between the rich and the poor, the tablet has failed to impress its target audience due to poor performance. However, the governments of Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Kerela have managed to extract political mileage from this idea by promising tablet computers to school students in their states.
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