With low-cost tablet Aakash, sky is the limit for students

BSc student Manjula Srinivasan is thinking of buying a tablet in the New Year. The tech-savvy girl from Bangalore had always dreamt of owning a tablet, something which her classmates would show-off in the canteen. However, the Rs30,000-40,000 price-tag was too high enough to spoil her dreams.

But now Manjula will finally be able to make her dream buy, that too just by saving her pocket-money, thanks to the Rs3,000 tablet, which is formally set to hit the market in January.

Like Manjula, Rajan, the 14-year-old son of her domestic help, also stands to benefit from the low-cost tablet the government is planning to buy and utilise for the public education system.

Studying in a government school in rural Karnataka, Rajan had just heard about Internet, but neither his school nor his parents could afford to buy computers.

With the Central government having placed order the tablet Aakash — at a price of $49.98 each — for introduction in education system, the likes of Rajan can think of exploring the world with the touch of a finger.

These tablets have been designed primarily for students and keeping the education sector in mind, says Suneet Singh Tuli, CEO of Datawind, the Canadian company which developed Aakash. He says the aim is to provide good Internet access everywhere and all the time as well as facilitate educational and entertainment videos and other multimedia content to students.

“Students stand to benefit through Internet access and the product is designed to meet this requirement,” he adds.

The government, which launched the National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology in 2009 aimed at spreading digital literacy, floated tenders for low-cost digital devices. Datawind, which had developed a relatively low-cost tablet and demonstrated it at a trade-show in Las Vegas in January this year, bid for the tender and won the contract.

“We are supplying the tablet to the government at $49.98 per device. We have a government order for 100,000 units, of which we have already supplied 10,000 units,” Tuli says.

UbiSlate7, the commercial version of Aakash, costs Rs 3,000 in the open market.

Based on current demand, Datawind expects to sell five million tablets within a year.

According to data from various reports, almost 8,000 tablets are sold every day in India.

According to Frost and Sullivan, Indians bought around 3 lakh tablets in 2011, which is a lot less when compared to global standards.

Sandip Biswas, director of Deloitte India, feels the same. “The tablet market in India is not more than a few lakhs. Globally the figure is around 21 million,” he said and added that in India, a tablet is considered more of a fashion gadget rather than a utility device.

He also said the market for low-cost tablet is yet to develop in India.

However Tuli begs to differ. He feels that the tablet market in the country is much more than a few lakhs.

Sharat Satyanarayana, director-marketing, Lakshmi Access Communications Systems (LACS), a Bangalore-based firm that manufactures Tablet Magnum — priced Rs 6,999—expects the tablet market to go beyond 1 million units in the coming year. “The market is at a nascent stage with several players vying for customer attention,” he says.

Some experts, nonetheless, believe that a high-end smartphone, which is in the same price range as an average tablet, is preferred by consumers, as the former is loaded with numerous features that can be easily matched with a tablet. “Serious Internet users do not mind taking out their netbook or laptop to do their work. If a quick search on the Internet is to be done, the smartphone is already there,” Biswas says.

However, Tuli remains optimistic about the tablet market. “I am not competing with the high-end products in the market. I feel that by hitting the right price points we will be able to capture a larger market,” he says.

According to him, the primary target for the low-cost tablet are students and that the government while floating the tenders was looking for relatively inexpensive deceives which would boost education.

Some experts feel that as far as low-cost products go, there is huge competition from China. “Today China is the world’s manufacturing hub for low-cost products of some of the top brands of mobile phones, computers, tablet PCs and other consumer electronics products. I feel it is a misconception that Chinese products are of poor quality,” Satyanarayana says.

Besides the Central government, Datawind also plans to engage with state governments, NGOs, municipalities, etc. to promote the tablet in the education sector.

Like Datawind, the NGO One Laptop Per Child India (OLPC) Foundation has been providing XO laptops — which is of the size of a textbook —  complete with a microphone and colour vision camera to children to facilitate learning.

OLPC has received orders for about 600,000 XO laptops from the governments of Manipur, Himachal Pradesh, Orissa, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, its chairman Satish Jha says.
Since July 2008, OLPC has distributed over 5,000 XO laptops across the country, and Jha says they plan to reach 250 million under-privileged children.

The education sector will benefit immensely from such initiatives as they provide technology to students at an affordable price, says Sanjaya Sharma, CEO of Tata Interactive Systems, which provides multi-media content to school children. “Such assistive or adaptive technology is essential for both students and teachers.”

According to Karthik KS, CEO of Avagmah Online, an online learning company, the availability of tablets at affordable prices can hold a lot of value and hence Avagmah is testing it for its operational capabilities.