Based on past experience (personal and otherwise), any technology or project touted by the Indian government (and most governments, at that) is vaporware until shipped.
The $30 number is doubtful because quite regularly, the government subsidizes projects to meet numerical targets like this. But the article says the $30 cost doesn't consider the cost of distribution. Even if the hardware really costs only $30 to make, distribution is going to at least double that. If this is to be sold by retail vendors, which is the only real way to sell this in a country like India, add another $30 to the cost.
>>>any technology or project touted by the Indian government (and most governments, at that) is vaporware until shipped.<<<
It depends a lot on the leadership and what are the driving forces behind something like this. Take the Apollo program; you had a charismatic leader whose death had to be avenged by fulfilling his dream. Further, there was a clear vision and a sense of urgency along with new leadership conducive to carrying out that goal. All of that and more made it a success, but the minute that fervor wore off it was killed. Think about it.
Kapil Sibal is one of the most intense, charismatic and brilliant people I know. Yes, he is a politician and by virtue he is suspect, but it still holds true. The programs he set up do work. I am saying this since I benefited from one of them. He started, or pushed off IRIS (http://www.irissciencefair.com/about_iris.php) the indian version of ISEF (http://www.societyforscience.org/isef/). That program is simply amazing, and it gave me the exposure that I desperately needed.
So, maybe you never know. It might work out after all. Whether or not this will change the basic situation of the indian education system is another matter altogether.
I have to admit Sibal has been doing good things with his education portfolio such as Eliminating 10th Standard board exams and allowing students to pick optional subjects regardless of stream. Fingers crossed for this and other ambitious projects succeeding.
You can buy single quantities of ARM-based netbooks & tablets from China for under $90 a unit, including international shipping.(^)
So your estimates line up with that experience. I'd guess that if the Indian government really wanted to provide a lot of these to school students, they could bring the cost down a fair bit by either bulk-buying or bulk-producing, though.
I'd be interested to find out what the intended OS is, and what the plans for providing suitable useful educational software are, though.
I think the line, "The final price will depend on the transportation cost." is very telling and something we will be hearing more and more in the future.
Third world countries are cheaper for certain things. Namely products with a lot of local labor, which is cheap. That's why food (locally grown with local labor), rickshaws (driven by local labor), etc. are very cheap in India.
But items which aren't produced by local labor aren't necessarily so cheap. For example, the RAM, CPU, batteries, and LCD screen all come from the same places that US manufacturers buy their components. So they aren't going to be any cheaper because the product is sold in India.
Actually, they proposed to make a $10 laptop, and the device in the article appears to be the result of that effort. Here's an article from four years ago covering the proposal:
I just read the article. Are these people for real or living in an ivory tower? Or are they just fucking lying to the Indian public to spite the $100 MIT Laptop effort? "No one had any doubt about the feasibility of the project. Everyone is enthusiastic and wants a quick rollout. But we have given ourselves three years before the first $10 laptop comes out." That sounds like politician double talk at its finest.
Indian government has really ambitious plans here, I will wait to see that how many of them actually reach to students. The rampant corruption in the bureaucracy in India, make sure that needy students hardly get any advantage of this schemes. Best way to make sure that this laptops reaches the students is to outsource the supply chain to some NGO.
This thing is not going to market for Rs. 1500. That much just about gets you a barely usable dumbphone around here, no way it's going to get you a tablet -- even if it runs a free OS like Android.
It's quite an ugly beast though ... anything on the resolution of that display? Looks very stretched to me.
This would be an interesting thing to give to students here in the US, where $30 dollars is, at most, a day's salary. In India, it could take a month for a family to earn enough to buy one.
Something like this is an excellent candidate for Android OS. If they just design it with Android in mind they will have quality software and save a huge amount of money since Android is free.
Not sure about the smaller one, although it looks kinda familiar.
The "Minimum Functionalities expected" certainly looks like something a government bureaucrat wrote. "4. Unzip tool for unzipping zip files." in the same list as "10. Cloud computing option."
Please downvote till you actually hear about these being used by real people, not just a fat Indian minister who probably thinks 8 asterisks is his password because that's what he sees on the screen when his secretary open his email for him.
That's good to know. Still, my skepticism of the Indian culture of corruption remains. Until the lofty plan trickles down into tangible reality, please remember that the India story has never been about what the politicians do for the people, but about what the private sector manages to get done, despite the politicians.
tl;dr version : Go ahead and downvote me, but it's not real in India until it is, especially if it's a politician's word.
The $30 number is doubtful because quite regularly, the government subsidizes projects to meet numerical targets like this. But the article says the $30 cost doesn't consider the cost of distribution. Even if the hardware really costs only $30 to make, distribution is going to at least double that. If this is to be sold by retail vendors, which is the only real way to sell this in a country like India, add another $30 to the cost.