Learning from their past mistakes, the Government of India has decided to give the IITs a skip for testing the latest Aakash 4 tablet. Read on…
Friday, January 24, 2014: The Government of India’s idea to provide low-cost computing device at subsidised rate to students to enable them access internet for educational purposes in the name of Aakash project has more often than not marred by controversies. However, this time round, the ambitious Aakash project has decided to learn from the past when keeping the IITs aside, but letting the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) for testing and certifying the Aakash 4.
Union Minister Kapil Sibal led Telecom Ministry is taking the lead in the project. C-DAC comes under the Department of Electronics & Information Technology, and eventually under Sibal. It can be recalled that last year, the HRD Ministry was slammed for its decision to award the project to the new and ill-equipped IIT Jodhpur.
IIT-Jodhpur was given a Rs 47.72 crore contract for procuring 100,000 Aakash tablets but not more than 600 devices supplied by Datawind were found good enough and the institute rejected 7500 devices calling them defective. Datawind on its part alleged the institute over-emphasized the same and accused the IIT of plagiarising military-type testing specification from HP and using them for the Aakash tablet. The testing was then transferred from IIT-Jodhpur to IIT-Bombay. C-DAC will reportedly conduct a two-stage testing procedure for Aakash 4.
