India's Aakash tablet computer partly made in China
The world's cheapest tablet computer, the £22 Aakash, was hailed by the Indian government as a symbol of national pride when it was launched last year, but the company which launched it has admitted it is partly made in China.
An Aakash-2 computing tablet Photo: AFP
By Dean Nelson, New Delhi
2:54PM GMT 26 Nov 2012
Its admission is the latest in a series of setbacks for the low-cost tablet computer the Indian government believed would bring the digital revolution to millions of poor people around the world.
The Aakash was launched in Delhi by the government's human resources minister Kapil Sibal who said it would provide them to children in schools throughout India, which would allow them to access previously scarce educational resources.
But deliveries were held up by rows between suppliers and designers, while technical criticism of its slow speed and clunky features weakened its appeal.
An upgraded model, Aakash 2, was released this month to address the earlier problems, but according to documents obtained by the Hindustan Times, it has been produced by suppliers in China and imported by its creators Datawind.
The newspaper said the company had imported 10,000 units of the Aakash from four Chinese suppliers between October 26th and November 7th and transported to India 'duty-free' under an exemption for government educational materials.
The government ordered 100,000 units of the new model last year on the understanding that it would be made in India.
Datawind's chief executive Sunit Singh Tuli dismissed the allegations but admitted the first ten thousand Aakash 2 tablets had used "motherboards and kits" manufactured in China.
"For expediency's sake we had the motherboards and kits manufactured in our Chinese subcontractor's facilities, and then the units have been 'kitted' in China at various manufacturers for expediency, whereas the final assembly and programming has happened in India. This was well discussed and we got approval prior to shipping. The initial devices were assembled and programmed at our facilities in New Delhi and Amritsar," he said. This was no different to Apple, which also uses Chinese suppliers, he added.
The claims raised concerns within India's information technology sector. Satish Babu, director of the Computer Society of India said Aakash "is expected to be an Indian product, however in view of the reports, we need authentic information to pass any judgment on the issue".
Kiran Karnik former head of Nasscom, India's IT industry body, said while it was not uncommon for IT hardware to be made in China, Aakash was meant to be Indian. "The main thing is the design and Research and Development. In case of Aakash, it was designed and developed in India but if it comes as a finished product, then it's an different story," he said.
