Launched in 2008 for $10, raising it's price to $20 and then $35, GOI lost 5 years of children's lives as India added another 100 million children to its school system.
Meanwhile, the prices of most computers have come down by more than half. Quality of most tablets has improved by an order of magnitude.
You can find overseas an amazing Kindle for $75. Am amazing olpc tablet for $150. They may cost twice as much in India for lack of scale and excessive duties etc. But they can be manufactured today for under $100 and distributed after adding logistics and distribution channel costs anywhere you like with no help from India.
To claim now that GOI tablet can be done for 8 times the original claims after 5 years or 4 generations of technology changes underlines our capabilities, or the lack of it, to understand how technologies evolve and products get created. Ultimately, what the GOI claims is very interesting. Only Intel could have done that in 2008 at $150. For an order of 10 million pieces, OLPC could have done it for $100 in 2008. 5 years later, announcing it for $70 to be done by those who not only just know both technology and product creation, but rather fathered the industry, is a bit like someone claiming parenthood for 5 years only to realize it with the help of either in vitro or other techniques at a very high cost, while adoption may have been a far more practical and immediate and honest a solution in the first place.
What Sibal did achieve due to his stubbornness and an inability to grasp how technologies and products get created is an embarrassing tail of India's prejudices hurting it's pride on the stage it tried claiming a title to.
Finally, there is an admission that India's claims will be delivered by those who know the industry, those who launched it in the first place, on the terms it can be done with what could have been done 5 years ago.
Had Sibal accepted $75 as the purchase price in 2008, by now 100 million children would have learnt differently in India.
By taking 5 years to learn it can not do it, India underscored what a slow learner it is and how our leader's inability to learn has kept a nation generations behind the times, bound and chained.
What a pity!
Satish Jha
