Question : AAKASH TABLET

(a) whether the Government has launched the advance version of low cost tablet called Aakash-2;

(b) if so, the details thereof along with the salient features of Aakash-2;

(c) whether the Government is planning to provide Aakash-2 free of cost to students particularly to the rural and poor students belonging to the weaker sections of the society;

(d) if so, the details thereof including the modalities/norms worked out by the Government in this regard; and

(e) the time frame by which these tablets will be distributed among the students?

MINISTER OF HUMAN RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT (SHRI M.M. PALLAM RAJU)

(a) to (e): A statement is laid on the Table of the House.

STATEMENT REFERRED TO IN REPLY TO PARTS (a) to (e) OF THE LOK SABHA STARRED QUESTION NO. 179 ASKED BY SHRI EKNATH M. GAIKWAD AND SHRI N.S.V. CHITTHAN, HON’BLE MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT REGARDING AAKASH-2 TABLET.

(a) & (b) Yes Sir, the advanced version of low cost access device (LCAD) called Aakash-2 tablet was launched by the Hon’ble President of India on the occasion of National Education Day i.e. 11th November, 2012.

The salient feature of ‘Aakash-2’ tablet includes 7” multi-touch capacitive projective display with at least 800x480 resolutions. It runs on Android 4.0 (Ice-Cream Sandwich) operating system, powered by 1 GHz processor and HD video playback support. For internet connectivity it has in built Wi-Fi support. The device has 4 GB of internal storage memory and a SD card slot which can operate SD cards upto 32 GB. It has 512 MB RAM and 3000 mAh battery. For the advanced version of tablet Aakash-2, many useful applications and content has been built in. Some of the important applications are as follows:

(i) Interactive lesson building tool ‘ProxyMITY’.

(ii) ‘Clicker’ application which permits quizzes to be conducted on-line in class rooms in real time.

(iii) Standard educational contents in pdf and HTML can now be easily stored and read on Aakash-2. As a demonstration, some school books available in digital format from NCERT, and a state board for school students have been ported.

(iv) A ‘Robot-Controller’ as a demonstration of engineering control applications.

(v) Spoken tutorials can be used on Aakash-2.

(vi) Some educational animations have been built, and open source software tools are being developed and adopted for creating interactive animations to run on Aakash-2.

(vii) Programming environment which permits students to use these tablets as a regular computer to write programs in C, C++, and Python.

(viii) The Scilab package has been fully ported on Aakash-2,

(ix) Aadhar biometric authentication has been integrated with Aakash-2.

(x) Linux Operating System has been ported on Aakash, which is being further optimized.

(xi) Reception of country wide class room on Aakash through A-view video conferencing software especially designed for students and teachers.

(c) to (e) Presently there is no proposal in this regard. However, under National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology (NMEICT), a project is being implemented by IIT Bombay for achieving following deliverables after acquiring the LCADs (Aakash-2) for teacher empowerment:

(i) Acquisition and testing of low cost access cum computing devices; and

(ii) Hardware & software optimization of low cost access cum computing devices.

In the first phase 1,00,000 tablets are for the purpose of testing by users all over India in different climatic and usage conditions. Since these tablets are for the purpose of testing and teacher empowerment, they would not be distributed to the students in the 1st phase.