India's Aakash Tablet Will Be Free For Students

Bengaluru, Karnataka: Kapil Sibal, the Union Minister for Human Resource Development, Communications and Information Technology, Government of India, has announced that Aakash tablets will be free in the hands of every student in India.
Sibal at the India Semiconductor Association (ISA) Vision Summit 2012 further said that based on the feedback from Aakash 1, they would be launching Aakash 2 which is a much better, faster and more efficient version. The current cost of Aakash is Rs. 2,276, for one lakh units. The cost, however, will reduce to Rs.1,500 once the manufacturing numbers increase to one million. Sibal said that half of cost would be subsidized by the government and the remaining Rs.750 would be funded by educational institutions.Speaking at the occasion Sibal said: “Today electronics is the largest and fastest growing manufacturing industry in the world. Current global hardware production is around $1.75 trillion and by 2020 it is going to grow up to $2.4 trillion. On the domestic front, electronic driven industry has emerged as the contributor to national economy. We can develop semiconductor manufacturing in India since we have the chip design services available here and enormous high quality human resource. We should be able to leverage that to ensure that we can develop the semiconductor manufacturing sector in India.”