Cheapest Laptop | Eye brows raised over India’s $20 Laptop

India is all set to digitize the future. They have come up with a prototype laptop which will only cost $20, the cheapest laptop. Nicknamed as Sakshat, the machine is meant to build the digital gap and provide a means for delivering online educational materials to students in more than 15,000 colleges across the country. However the is a lot of skepticism going hand in hand along with the project.

One Laptop per Child (OLPC) foundation started the mission with the XO machine as the pioneer laptop. The machine originally costed $100, but the price now is $188. While the foundation still want to come up with a break through laptop costing less than $100 and can even reach $75 in its next version.

OLPC’s former vice president, Jim Gettys says its far more impossible to create a $20 machine. He adds, “I don’t understand how anyone can build anything for real at that price. There are too many components that cost $20 by themselves, never mind as a package.” He mentions that even in volume, a low-cost screen runs to more than $20, while touch pads and keyboards cost $5 to $10 apiece, and memory and processors cost considerably more.

The launching ceremony was held on Tuesday in Tirupati, India, by the Indian Education Ministry. Sakshat has a 2GB of RAM and wireless and fixed Ethernet connections, power consumption is just 2Watts. The model will be available in retail in India in six months.

It took several months to create the laptop and lots of cooperation was involved by various institutes like India’s Vellore Institute of Technology; the Indian Institute of Science, in Bangalore; and the Indian Institute of Technology, in Madras. R.P. Agrawal who is the Secretary of secondary and higher education in India and is also leading the project did not answer much questions and there wasn’t any official announcement yet.

“Wish the $20 laptop were true,” Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of OLPC wrote in an e-mail, adding that if the laptop’s claims were “close to true,” it would be “a sign of great success” for OLPC in spurring development of low-cost machines for students around the world. “The technical data we have received to now suggests it is very inferior, but that does not matter at all,” he added.

Whatever the cost and capabilities of the machine be but the effort is definitely remarkable. In 2006, Sudeep Banerjee, then the Indian minister of education, criticized the OLPC laptop and educational software as “pedagogically suspect” and added, “We need classrooms and teachers more urgently than fancy tools.” But yesterday, the aims of the Sakshat project seemed extraordinarily similar to those of OLPC.