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The Reality of the Rs.500 'Laptop'

10.02.2009
A laptop at Rs.500 (US$10), no matter how barebones, sounds like the biggest thing to happen for personal computing. Being developed in India, we must be seething with national pride and a sense of achievement. The only problem is, this 'Rs. 500 laptop' is not really a laptop. Not by a long shot. In a gross misrepresentation of facts, this 'laptop' is actually a device that can store information when connected to a laptop. This device has 2GB of memory that can hold e-books and can connect with the government's e-learning portal, Sahshat (www.sakshat.ac.in). The e-books can then be accessed on a PC or be printed. This looks like a flash drive with a feature to sync to an online portal rather than a standalone computing device. It comes with wired and wireless networking capability though. But you get no display, no keyboard. Probably this is the reason why there were no photos released when this product was 'unveiled'.

This laptop has been developed jointly by the Indian Institute of Science and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Chennai. To make matters more embarrassing, the original price of $10 has gone up to $20. Meanwhile, the much talked about $100 laptop envisioned by the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project is at least three years away according to research firm Gartner who said the laptop "will not be a realistic target for the next three years".

We came across a press release from the Press Information Bureau (Govt. of India) where Minister of State for Higher Education, D. Purandeswari said "the Government also aims to provide 100 dollar laptops to students. Research in this direction is being already carried out at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras." If this is the same laptop in question, a zero has gone missing somewhere in its price. At $100 (approx Rs.5,000), this may be a competitor for OLPC.