The manufacturer of Aakash One tablet, Suneet Singh Tuli, CEO, Datawind, talks about how the company has created a new market for low cost tablets in India
Aakash One and UBI slate have set a new benchmark in low cost segment. It has led to collapse in pricing and that is a good thing for education in this country. The price pressure was really essential and now market is expanding. The demand is enormous. The struggle for awareness and demands is not the same.
What about applications?
The apps are broken into three areas, one of which is the area of ebooks. The ebook content is CBSE curriculum, NCERT books, etc. and that is the big portion of the market. There are lot of video based learning tools in the market. People like the Khan Academy and government under NMEICT, have huge amount of online video based courses which are useful in tablets. Third you need games based that are being created for interactive learning environment for students.
Challenges
One of the biggest challenges is connectivity. There are lot of entry level tablets, but these tablets are connected only by WiFi. Now the problem is that in India there are 13 million broadband connection addressing 13 million families in a country of 1.2 billion population. Majority of population does not have access to WiFi. For the dissemination of content wide area network is essential. Wide area connectivity and cellular connective is essential to utilise the full potential of tablets.
