  Is Aakash tablet going to be a bigger political game plan for UPA and the Congress in the run up to the 2014 general elections. If the obsession of the telecom minister Kapil Sibal with the Datawind device is anything to go by, it looks as if the government seems to be looking at it as a game changer like the cash transfer scheme.
Sibal on Monday revealed at a function that the government may procure the Aakask tablet at Rs 1500 per piece and distribute it to the students at Rs. 1,130 apiece. He said that he has already discussed the plan with Rajat Moona (Director General,C-DAC). The present cost of the tablet at which the government is purchasing it from Datawind is Rs. 2,263 apiece.
In December 2012 Kapil Sibal said that Aakash would be available to the students at a price of Rs 1900 ($35).
He said that Aakash has all the amenities of any modern tablet. “It performs the same function as a $150 tablet,” Sibal had said.
The government is in process to get Cabinet approval for manufacturing of 50 lakh units of Aakash tablet in India, Sibal had said.
Not only this, before that in the same month the much talked about tablet designed, developed and manufactured by DataWind Ltd. for supply to IIT Bombay was launched by the President Pranab Mukherjee.
DataWind is to supply 100,000 units of Aakash 2 to IIT Bombay, which intends to distribute them to Engineering University and College students.
Few days back an English daily had reported that DataWind founders and NRI brothers Suneet and Raja Singh Tuli may have procured these devices off-the-shelf from manufacturers in China for $42 ( Rs. 2,263 then), exactly the price at which they sold these to the Indian government.
But Tuli had refuted this saying that for expediency sake it had the motherboards and kits manufactured in its Chinese subcontractor's facilities, and then the units have been 'kitted' in China at various manufacturers whereas the final assembly and programming has happened in India.
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