MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

India develops 35 US dollars touch-screen laptop

India's Human resource development minister Kapil Sibal

The Indian government announced the development of a touch-screen laptop pitched at students at a cost of 35 US dollars. The low cost device, which runs Linux, is being readied for production.

India's Human resource development minister Kapil Sibal said that “the motherboard, its chip, the processing, connectivity, all of them cumulatively cost around 35 USD, including memory, display, everything”.

While 35 USD is pretty impressive, even for a nation that is known for cutting costs, according to Sibal, the aim is to bring the cost down to just 10 USD. While the minister pointed out that the system would have many of the same amenities found on more expensive machines, he also mentioned that the hardware was designed to accept new components should user's needs change.

It seems the Indian Government felt it was necessary to go it alone, even with the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) and Intel's Classmate on the market. Those machines do cost significantly more and given the growing technological prowess of India, it's little surprise that a home grown design is about to out do more mature rivals.

Sibal said that the Indian Government is looking for hardware manufacturers to make its design a reality.

Sibal said the laptop with the Linux system would be distributed starting 2011 in tertiary studies institutions.

The laptop was Developer by research groups from India’s two main technological institutions, India’s Technology Institute and the Indian Institute of Science.
India spends in the range of 3% of GDP on education and has managed to increase literacy to 65% of its population of 1.2 billion.