THIS INNOVATION HAS LED NOWHERE
Tuesday, 09 April 2013 | Satish Jha | in Oped
India can make a cheap tablet provided it sets up a programme to do so, creates a $250 million research and development budget, and gets on board a global team with a proven track record of creating products for the future
Aakash, India’s low cost computer for education, is back in the news again. The new Union Minister for Human Resource Development revaluating it and the former Ministers continuing to swear by it, has added a new dimension to India’s ambition to claim a turf that has eluded it for over a decade. Going by the tale of Aakash being spun during all of UPA2, there seems to be little interest in understanding the real issues around it, whether by the Union Government, academics or the media.
From Simputer to Mobilis to Saakshat to Aakash, India’s pursuit of a low-cost device has cost it dear, with little learning. India has been claiming since 2006 that it will make the world’s lowest priced computer. The first attempt was to make a $10 laptop that led to showcasing a pen drive 125 times larger than normal 1cm x 2.5cm, and the world laughed at us into its oblivion. That was when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had promised to deliver an affordable and rugged laptop for the poor in villages for $100. As it became clear that the MIT’s laptop would cost Rs15,000 in India, going by the principle of producing it at a 10th of the cost of the MIT product, the Union Human Resource Development Ministry declared that they would produce a Rs1,500 laptop in three months.
That was in 2009. The rupee was strong then and Rs1,500 translated into $35. Deadline after deadline, announcement following announcement, it took the Ministry over a year to showcase a tablet, not a laptop, that was named Saakshat. It was on every television screen, on the front pages around the world. Yet again, several deadlines were missed, and 27 months after the initial promise, the Ministry showcased the second computer. Its specifications were diluted way beyond the promise to the extent that it had to be renamed. The new name was Aakash.
The din continued, and the parallel noise that it was a dud became so loud that the Union Human Resource Development Ministry had little choice other than to announce Aakash2. Now, it’s been another 12 months since that was announced, and India has not managed to put 1,00,000 Aakash tablets in the hands of students.
In Aakash, India’s aspirations to prove its technological prowess have hit the reality on the ground that India has neither a technological ecosystem capable of designing and manufacturing a laptop that is cheaper than what is offered by the rest of the world, nor an ability to create new technologies that can bring the cost of the product down.
The IITs are teaching institutions but they have no track record of creating cutting-edge technologies or products. So, when established IITs declined to toe the Human Resource Development Ministry line, the Ministry decided to create a new IIT with the most important purpose of producing the low-cost computers. It’s a bit like laying the foundation of the kitchen when the guests have arrived for dinner.
When the new IIT could not deliver, the Ministry managed to rope in older IITs that had wised up a bit by now and wanted to take a shot at the project. They were the same folks who had realised the limitations and could not produce even the right specifications in several years. No matter what they did, a workable computing power could not be packed into a tablet for $35.
Governments are experts in doling out subsidies. So it was decided that they could buy what worked at a higher price of $50 from China, and distribute with a subsidy at Rs1,500. The numbers looked different every time since the planning never took into account foreign exchange fluctuations. The vendor cannot offer anything because the Ministry’s specifications will not work and, in any case, will cost more. The Ministry is inflexible on price, and even China cannot produce a cheaper device for India to claim its own.
Why is it that India does not realise that it has made a laughing stock of itself among those who understand these things? It has little to do with what can be done. There are things that are possible, and there are things we can aspire for and even achieve — like putting man on the moon. Just that the man on the moon project was backed by the technological prowess, a resolve and the resources required to make it happen.
India can make a cheap tablet provided it sets up a programme to do so, creates a $250 million research & development budget, imagines and understands how education can be delivered over the next decade, gets a global team with a proven track record of creating products for the future — regardless of the team’s nationality, and learns what product creation process is all about. Perhaps then — and perhaps only then — will the next decade see the country create something that the world may find acceptable.
