India Hopes to Make $10 Laptops a Reality

sas-dot writes "We all know Nicholas Negroponte's $100 OLPC. India, which was a potential market, rejected it. India's Human Resources Development ministry's idea to make laptops at $10 is firmly taking shape with two designs already in and public sector undertaking Semiconductor Complex evincing interest to be a part of the project. So far, the cost of one laptop, after factoring in labor charges, is coming to $47 but the ministry feels the price will come down dramatically considering the fact that the demand would be for one million laptops."

Comments

I must be living in a story book..

[QuantumG]

Umm.. I never thought I would see competition for supplying education to the poor.

What a strange time we live in.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[Paradise Pete]

Scientific calculators in India cost around 600RS(15$). How come a child laptop cost 10$.

The article doesn't actually say it will be a computer. Maybe it's just a slab of wood or something.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[EoN604]

The article doesn't actually say it will be a computer. Maybe it's just a slab of wood or something. Pff. 'wood'. Look at me, I'm making people Happy! I'm the magical man, from Happy Land, who lives in a gumdrop house on Lolly Pop Lane! Try cardboard. At best.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[sid0]

Actually, I AM an Indian. I live in India, and I have as much faith in the government as an atheist has in God.

You may be interested to know that I don't get electricity for more than 18 hours a day in the summer months -- and that a large percentage of the population still lives in huts.

side note:

[Hanzie]

I've always thought having a monitor that could detach to be stand-alone or attach with a standard mount would greatly help consumers. It wouldn't be too good for the manufacturers, who generally charge more for a replacement screen than a newer laptop would cost.

With these gov't subsidized deals, though, I'm hopeful.

It should help out by decreasing replacement costs (swap the main unit OR the screen, not both).

Meanwhile, I can't wait to see these Indian cheapies on eBay!

hanzie.

Remember Simputer

[gopla]

Avery body here is aware of a project called Simputer, that was being run by IISc, Bangalore some 5 years ago. That project also had aim of providing computer at about Rs 5000 (@100 USD at rough rate of 50 Rs/USD). It turned out to be a huge failure.

This seems to be another vapour ware project, whose main aim is to extract government money. A present even simple mouse costs more than Rs. 500.

There is a saying in Sanskrit vachanesu kim dardratam . Why should you act as poor if only thing you have to do is to make promise. You can promise Rs 5.0 laptop, if you know that nobody is going to held you accountable at end of 5 year project and spending million dollar, and delivering nothing.

Gopla

As an Indian IT person,

[Kream]

I have to say

a) The ministry in question has never ever (to my knowledge) developed anything that can even remotely be called technological hardware.
b) The CPU, the RAM and many of the other components will have to be imported because India doesn't have a single factory that makes them.
c) Is it even remotely possible to buy in bulk a laptop-grade battery for $10 ? My low-end cellphone battery costs (retail) more.
d) What will the machine boot from ? a hard drive ? Flash? SSD?
e) IF a laptop is being designed for India, it will have to support Indic languages. And as someone who works in Indic computing, the best input methods/rendering backends involve QT, GTK or MS. (Despite working on the wretched problem for years and years and spending crores of the taxpayer's money, there's still no reliable input method for entering Devanagari text on the 80x25 console.) MS is out because there's no way you can build an x86 based or WinCE based machine for $10. Maybe some ARM+Linux based machines could run QT/GTK. But, again, $10 seems awfully low.

*sigh*

Aniruddha Shankar