Tag: DataWind

Instead of reaching the sky, Aakash ends up six feet below

The Wire
July 15, 2015

Once at the centre of the Indian government’s half-baked schemes to make classrooms tech-savvy, the Aakash project wound down quietly in March 2015, an RTI has revealed. The project envisaged lakhs of school and engineering students armed with a tablet each, sold at Rs.1,130 courtesy the government, from which they partake of their lessons, access digitised textbooks and visualise complicated diagrams. Lofty as these goals were, the project was backed by little public infrastructure and much less coordination, resulting in almost no traction despite being punctuated regularly with PR ops.

The project was conceived in 2011 by the UPA-2 government to parallel the One Laptop Per Child program, forgetting conveniently that the latter worked only in small Uruguay and for unique reasons. Anyway, a British-Canadian company named DataWind was contracted to manufacture the tablets, which the government would then purchase for Rs.2,263 and subsidise so as to retail them at Rs.1,130.

However, the second version, whose development was led by IIT-Bombay and the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, released in November 2012 bordered on the gimmicky. It had 512 MB RAM, a 7” screen, a 1 GHz processor and, worst of all, a battery that lasted all of three hours even as a full day at school typically spanned seven. Even so, the government announced that 50 lakh such tablets would be manufactured and that 1 lakh teachers would be trained to use it. In March 2013, then Union HRD Minister Pallam Raju called it the government’s “dream project”.

But what really crippled the program was not the operational delays or logistical failures but the Central government’s lackadaisical assumption that placing a tablet in a student’s hands would solve everything. For example, it was advertised that Aakash would be a load off children’s backs, eliminating the need to lug around boatloads of books. However, the NCERT didn’t bother to explain which textbooks would be digitised first – or at all – and when they’d be available. Similarly, the low-income households whose younger occupants the tablets targeted didn’t have access to regular electricity let alone an Internet connection. What the tablets would ultimately do was become, for those who couldn’t afford to maintain and use them, a burden.

The Aakash train on the other hand was on rails of its own. By November 2011, DataWind had shipped 6,440 devices but only 650 were found good enough to sell. Nonetheless, in January 2013, IIT-Bombay announced it was starting work on Aakash 3, and by July the same year had skipped to working on the fourth iteration. Then, in September 2013, the CAG alleged that IIT-Rajasthan, which had handled the Aakash project in 2011, had been awarded the project arbitrarily, received Rs.47.42 crore without any prior feasibility checks, and overran its budget by Rs.1.05 crore. However, this did nothing to slow things down.

The biggest beneficiary was DataWind, the air in its bellows blown by the Central government’s fantasy of arming itself with the same cargo that Western institutions sported. Between December 2013 and July 2014, the company was able to announce three new models in the Rs.4,000-7,000 price range, introduce one for the UK priced at ₤30, raised Rs.168 crore in an IPO, listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange and got on the MIT Tech Review’s 50 smartest tech companies of 2014 list for breaking “the price barrier”.

The RTI application that revealed Aakash had been wound down also received the reply that the project had achieved all its objectives: of procuring one lakh devices, testing them and establishing 300 centres in engineering colleges – speaking nothing of the more ostentatious goal of linking 58.6 lakh students across 25,000 colleges and 400 universities through an ‘e-learning’ program. The reply also stated that specifications for a future device had been submitted to the MHRD. Whether the project will be revived by the ruling BJP government later is unknown.

And on that forgettable note of uncertainty, one of the more misguided digital-India schemes comes to a close.

Reaching for the… sky?

This article, as written by me, appeared in The Hindu on December 4, 2012.

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The Aakash initiative of the Indian government is an attempt to bolster the academic experience of students in the country by equipping them with purpose-built tablets at subsidised rates.

The Aakash 2 tablet was unveiled on November 11, 2012. It is the third iteration of a product first unveiled in October, 2011, and is designed and licensed by a British-Canadian-Indian company named DataWind, headed by chief executive Suneet Singh Tuli.

On November 29, the tablet received an endorsement from the United Nations, where it was presented to Secretary-General Ban-ki Moon by India’s ambassador to the UN, Hardeep Singh Puri, and Tuli.

DataWind will sell Aakash 2 to the government at Rs. 2,263, which will then be subsidised to students at Rs. 1,130. However, the question is this: is it value for money even at this low price?

When it first entered the market, Aakash was censured for being underpowered, underperforming, and just generally cheap. Version one was a flop. The subsequently upgraded successor, released April, 2012, was released commercially before it was remodelled into the Aakash 2 to suit the government’s subsidised rate. As a result, some critical features were substituted with some others whose benefits are either redundant or unnecessary.

Aakash 2 is more durable and slimmer than Aakash, even though both weigh 350 grams. If Akash is going to act as a substitute for textbooks, that would be a load off children’s schoolbags.

But the Ministry of Human Resource Development is yet to reveal if digitised textbooks in local languages or any rich, interactive content have been developed to be served specifically through Aakash 2. The 2 GB of storage space, if not expanded to a possible 32 GB, is likely to restrict the quantity of content further, whereas the quality will be restrained by the low 512 MB of RAM.

The new look has been achieved by substituting two USB ports that the first Aakash had for one mini-USB port. This means no internet dongles.

That is a big drawback, considering Aakash 2 can access only Wi-Fi networks. It does support tethering capability that lets it act as a local Wi-Fi hotspot. But not being able to access cellular networks like 3G, such as in rural areas where mobile phone penetration is miles ahead of internet penetration, will place the onus on local governments to lay internet-cables, bring down broadband prices, etc.

If the device is being envisaged mainly as a device on which students may take notes, then Aakash 2 could pass muster. But even here, the mini-USB port rules out plugging in an external keyboard for ease of typing.

Next, Aakash 2’s battery life is a meagre 4 hours, which is well short of a full college day, and prevents serious student use. Video-conferencing, with a front-facing low-resolution camera, will only drain the battery faster. Compensatory ancillary infrastructure can only render the experience more cumbersome.

In terms of software, after the operating system was recently upgraded in Aakash 2, the device is almost twice as fast and multi-tasks without overheating. But DataWind has quoted “insufficient processing power” as the reason the tablet will not have access to Android’s digital marketplace. Perhaps in an attempt to not entirely short-change students, access to the much less prolific GetJar apps directory is being provided.

Effectively, with limited apps, no 3G, a weak battery and a mini-USB port, the success of the tablet and its contribution to Indian education seems to be hinged solely on its low price.

As always, a problem of scale could exacerbate Aakash 2’s deficiencies. Consider the South American initiative of the One Laptop Per Child program instituted in 2005. Peru, in particular, distributed 8.5 lakh laptops at a cost of US $225 million in order to enhance its dismal education system.

No appreciable gains in terms of test scores were recorded, however. Only 13 per cent of twelve-year olds were at the required level in mathematics and 30 per cent at the required reading level, the country’s education ministry reported in March 2012.

However, Uruguay, its smaller continent-mate, saw rapid transformations after it equipped every primary-school student in the country with a laptop.

The difference, as Sandro Marcone, a Peruvian ministry official, conceded, lay in Uruguayan students using laptops to access interactive content from the web to become faster learners than their teachers, and forming closely knit learning communities that then expanded.

Therefore, what India shouldn’t do is subsidise a tablet that could turn out to be a very costly notebook. Yes, the price is low, but given the goal of ultimately unifying 58.6 lakh students across 25,000 colleges and 400 universities, Aakash 2 could be revised to better leverage existing infrastructure instead of necessitating more.