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Aakash 2- A China-Made Tablet PC?
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The hardware of the tablet PCs may have been imported from China, which was later embellished with some applications made by a team from IIT Bombay.
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Saturday, November 24, 2012:
The Government of India may be taking pride in the recently launched educational tablet PC Aakash-2, but the fact may be that the tablet PC is not made in India and has been imported from China. The cheap tablet PC was launched by President Pranab Mukherjee on 11 November.
According to a Hindustan Times report, the hardware of the tablet PC may have been imported from China, which was later embellished with some applications made by a team from IIT Bombay.
ET has some documents showing that Datawind, the maker of Aakash, actually procured 12,000 devices of A13 model designed by China-based AllWinner. The documents reveal that the procurement was done a couple of weeks back before the launch of the device.
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It is worth mentioning here that ministry of external affairs is planning to showcase the device at the United Nations as a mark of Indian innovation. The tablet PCs costed Rs 2310 ($42). The tablet pcs were reportedly shipped by Kalong Technology Co. Ltd, Dasen International Electronics Co Ltd and Kalong Technology Co Ltd. If sources are to be believed, IIT-Bombay had issued a certificate fore issuing 20,000 tablets in India dated October 29 and had also recommended an import duty waiver just before the launch of world's cheapest tablet PC.
Going by the report, Datawind has sold Chinese tablet PCs to the government branding them as Aakash 2. Datawind has sold the tablet PCs at a price of Rs 2263 each.
Replying to the allegations made in the report, Suneet Singh Tuli, chief executive officer, Datawind, wrote in an email,
This sensationalist article is inaccurate and misleading. We deny the allegations made therein from unnamed ‘sources’.
Datawind is a design house that develops products and software. In the past we have developed a pocket internet device (Pocket Surfer) and net books such as our award winning seven inch and nine inch models which were sold worldwide. For these we developed all the printed circuit boards including
the CPU motherboard and developed the software that runs on these CPU's including our revolutionary compression technology that compresses data by an order of magnitude over anybody else so that it can run on the current net works in India. Our key technological advantage is that we provide high
speed internet access over the networks that are prevalent in rural India and our dream and goal is to provide the common man in India with low cost Internet. Our business model is similar to that of Apple where we use subcontract manufacturers to build our products. So, these are built in facilities of our contractors.
Anybody wishing to verify our technical competency can do this simply by checking the many dozens of patents we’ve received, on the U.S. government’s Patent & Trademark Office :http://tinyurl.com/d6o5283
We launched our low cost tablets in India a year ago which was and still is the lowest cost tablet in the world. These were built in India including all the circuit-boards in Hyderabad. This was based on a 360 MhzArm CPU. The next generation to that had an 800MHz Arm Cortex A8 CPU and all the boards were made in Hyderabad also.
The primary difference between Aakash I and 2 is the Capacitive Touch Screen. This is the most expensive and important element and this product is manufactured in our Montreal facility (Videos are uploaded on Youtube: http://youtu.be/8A39Yasa5fo and http://youtu.be/-vi6_94Mm8M) which has been visited by representatives of IIT. This is one of the primary reasons why our devices are lower cost than others, as we use a proprietary technology. The Aakash2 uses the All winner A13 chip, which has become the standard among low cost tablets. The software and mechanical parts are developed by us and the motherboards utilize our approved designs based on A13 reference. The media are welcome to visit our Montreal facility where this is done and we are happy to disclose our designs on a confidential basis.
For the first 10k units for IIT, and for expediency sake we had the motherboards and kits manufactured in our Chinese subcontractor's facilities, and then the units have been 'kitted' in China at various manufacturers for expediency, whereas the final assembly and programming has happened in
India. This was well discussed and we got approval prior to shipping. The initial devices were assembled and programmed at our facilities in New Delhi and Amritsar. We finished this batch of 10k units and delivered them to IIT and will be starting another batch of 20k units for them in two weeks. The media are welcome to visit when we do this batch. We also have four partner manufacturers across India that will work on the deliveries to the government but we just couldn't get them started to assemble our new Aakash2 units in time but they will start to ship early in December.
Further to this, we're setting up our second touch screen facility in India, which is going through pilot right now. The full clean room facility will be up and running in another month. We will be producing a press release at that time with tours.
We have been strong proponents of developing a manufacturing base in India, and our actions continue to reflect this. It looks like these allegations are a desperate attempt by somebody to sabotage the image of India, and we would urge you not to fall prey to such attempts.
Yours truly,
Suneet Singh Tuli
CEO, DataWind
Government's response on this issue is awaited but one thing is for sure, Aakash remains a controversial baby for the Government of India.
Diksha P Gupta, EFYTIMES News Network
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