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The hype around Sakshat, billed as India’s $10 Laptop, is likely to cause serious embarrassment to the Ministry of Human Resources Development, as it turns out to be a mere USB storage device.
The 10 inches long and 5 inches wide “computing device” has a 2 GM memory and interfaces with the “state of the art” e-learning portal Sakshat to download e-books, 5% of which are free, which can then be accessed by a user by connecting this device to a laptop or a printer. The device was unveiled on Tuesday at the inauguration of the national Mission on Education Program organized by the Union HRD Ministry at Tirupati.
The Hindu reports that the device is expected to cost between $20 to $30 initially, but may become cheaper eventually. The price is different from the $10 initial announcement and the subsequent retraction attributing the $10 number to a typo and putting the price at $100.
TOI reports that joint secretary N K Sinha “refused to comment as to why was it being projected as a laptop when it was not” but “some delegates at the exhibition claimed that with the help of this device a laptop costing about $60 can eventually be manufactured”!!! In a follow up story, TOI reports that “there is no clarity among the MHRD officials themselves” on how to “provide computers and internet connectivity in rural and remote areas”, without which the device won’t work at all.
MIT Technology Review points out that Indian officials had earlier “criticized the OLPC laptop and educational software as pedagogically suspect” and adds that Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of OLPC, has also expressed skepticism over the $10 laptop.
Preethi at MediaNama points out that “in the official government communications – here and here – the gadget is not mentioned” and Sakshat is mentioned as an e-learning portal. She also wonders why the “device is somehow expected to play a key role in the National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technologies”, which aims to “set up electronic classrooms and make online textbooks freely available for download across 18000 colleges and 4000 universities across India”.
Careless speech writers, over-excited bureaucrats, or a computer illiterate government department that cannot differentiate between a laptop, a computing device and a storage device: irrespective of the reasons behind this fiasco, it is bound to cause serious embarrassment all around (see Fast Company, Fox News, Ars Technica).
By the way, several sources — including Economic Times, Rediff, AFP, Forbes, Information Week, PC World and iGovernment — are still referring to the device as a laptop, presumably based on a press release, or misleading statements by MHRD officials.
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