HRD minister Kapil Sibal Monday officially named the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay responsible for the launch of the affordable tablet, Aakash-2. Mr Sibal made the announcement while addressing 9,000 teachers and students from across the country over a video link from New Delhi.
While speaking about the launch of Aakash-2, Mr Sibal said, “The version 2 of Aakash has a 800 Mhz processor and the life of the battery has been increased to about 3 hours and of course it has a capacitive screen which is of a much greater quality. Today we are going to symbolically hand over Aakash to the students.”
Lauding Dr D. Phatak of IIT-B, Mr Sibal said, “Three months ago we requested Dr Phatak to take on the responsibility. In those three months, there has been a sea change in our confidence in the project and today we are going to symbolically launch the low-cost Aakash device. Aakash is no longer just a device that only consumes content. Through the efforts of IIT-Bombay, it will be a device that creates content.” According to Prof. S. Sudarshan, a member of the team that worked and created the content for Aakash over the past three months, the teams comprising faculty and students from the computer science department worked round-the-clock to come up with unique student-friendly programmes in Python and C that can be learnt by students on their own. The same was confirmed by Mr Sibal in his address.
In March, the ambitious Aakash tablet project launched in October 2011 by the HRD faced the prospect of being scrapped as IIT Rajasthan that was handed the project backed out on the grounds that it was not possible for them to overcome the technical shortcomings that were highlighted during the testing phase.
The tablet supplied by Datawind failed tests pertaining to the speed of the processor, battery life and more importantly durability in harsh conditions and hence had to be reviewed.