Scientists from IIT and IISc design laptop for just Rs 1500

Updated on: Friday, July 23, 2010

Experts from IIT and IISc have come out with a laptop affordable even to economically downtrodden students and eventually for public too.

The HRD minister Kapil Sibal unveiled access-cum-computing device priced at Rs 1500 or $35 for students here on Thursday.

Designed by experts from IIT of Kanpur, Kharagpur and Madras and Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, the device contains -- a cross between I-Pad and tablet PC and charged by an solar panel and the upper price limit for the device is pegged at $35.

Sibal said, "Initially manufacturing might be done in Taiwan or some other place but eventually it will be done in India". He also said there are already enough offers for lower price. The $35 price, he said, is inclusive of cost of manufacturing abroad. However, the cost of the solar panel has not been factored into the price yet. The ministry is in talks with a company to bring down the cost of solar panels.

With such initiatives by the HRD ministry, the price is likely to come down to $20 or $10 in the next few months with more innovations to come.

Apart from school students even college students would be benefited through the device. At the current price point of $35, Sibal said, there would be 50% subsidy to educational institutions, which will effectively bring down the cost to only Rs 750. The initial order will be for no less than one lakh laptops.

Based on Open Source, the device does not have a hard-drive. It can not only support video-web conferencing facility, but also boasts of several other latest features -- multimedia content viewer (pdf, doc, ods, adp, xls, jpeg, gif,png, bmp, odt, zip, AVCHD, AVI, AC3), searchable Pdf reader, unzip tool for unzipping files, computing capabilities such as Open Office, SciLab for printing support, media player capable of playing streamed along with stored media files, USB port etc.

Scientists from IIT and IISc design laptop for just Rs 1500

More Education news