Aakash, the cheapest tablet in the world a failure already?

It came as a big news, when government of India announced the release of Aakash, the 'most affordable tablet ever', as a part of the technology and education promotion in the country. All thought things were going on fine,Android until the Govt conceded that the release was a failure. 

This is what the HRD Minister M M Pallam Raju had to say about the issue "... the other challenge is production-ising it. That is where the failure has come. If the production-isation had happened on time, students would have accessed to it. The product exists but we are not able to production-ise it as much as required". SO the flaw lies there. They were not able to cope up with the needs!

So when I said it is the cheapest tablet in the world, I really meant it. The subsidised selling rate for the tablet is Rs 1130, which in USD is 20$! So we are talking about a 20$ tablet here. The company that took up thw project, Datawind was asked to produce one lakh pieces, which never happened.  The HRD mininister continued "Aakash is a tablet which will enable you to access the content. But there are others who have come up...students will pick up whatever serves the purpose better and affordable. We will continue to work on the product as long as development of the product is concerned."

Ashok Thakur, the Higher Education Secretary said "The day Rajendra Pawar Committee submits the report, based on that we will take further action on whether to proceed with the Cabinet note or to concentrate and look at the immediate thing that is connectivity. The idea was that once we have supply of one lakh tablets, we would be able to proceed further...there has been a setback, it seems that have not been able to supply, so therefore."

So will the Government sue Datawind for not being able to keep up with the promise? What next with Aakash? Will have to wait and see!