Suneet Singh Tuli, a tall, elegant Canadian entrepreneur, runs company ‘Datawind’ manufactures the tablet devices that the children of a small two-storey building Akaal Purkh Ki Fauj (APKF) public school are using. The institution, which was constructed three years ago, has 25 teachers and caters for children from kindergarten to year nine.
Tuli spends much of his time travelling the world encouraging governments, state-level entities and NGOs to embark on pilot programmes for the Aakash. The list of countries that are investigating the effectiveness of learning with the device includes Uruguay, Argentina, Nicaragura, Mexico, Ghana, Nigeria and Senegal. In November 2012, Tuli presented the device to UN secretary general Ban-ki Moon in New York. The year before he spoke at the World Bank in Washington DC. Tuli spends two weeks a month away from his family, who live in Toronto; consequently, he is a master of negotiating cancelled flights and chaotic airports, largely conducting himself with serenity, although it’s clear that there’s steel beneath his composure.
Tuli’s vigour has been an asset to a project that has been mired in controversy almost since its inception. What he witnessed in the classroom in Kallah was just a tiny part of what the Indian government and its partners hope to achieve with the Aakash: to raise one billion people from poverty by means of a low-cost tablet device. The existence of the Aakash runs counter to many of the principles that have guided the world’s most successful technology companies and, indeed, the most basic tenet of capitalism — that of supply and demand meeting the needs of the market.
Impoverished people tend not to invest heavily in consumer goods; the per-capita income of the average Indian in 2011 was £819. For that reason, the Aakash is an anomaly: a piece of technology that is funded not by angel investors, venture capitalists or corporate backers, but by the public purse. In 2009, the Indian government announced a five-year plan that it hoped would accelerate its citizens’ education. Its intention was to build a framework that, eventually, will place hundreds of millions of tablet devices in the hands of some of the world’s poorest people.
The first 100,000 devices have been distributed among India’s 20,000 colleges and universities (there are test projects underway at 240 universities). After this they will be introduced to schools — APKF in Kallah is part of a modest pilot project. Quite when this will be is to be determined.
Bringing a billion people online would be a significant technological feat — but also a challenging one. Back in Kallah, the schoolchildren are watching an animated version of Aesop’s parable of the crow that puts stones in a jug of water to get a drink. The moral of the story is that where there’s a will, there’s a way — and Tuli seems to be proving this. In June, Datawind announced that sales of the Aakash 2 and UbiSlate, shipping some 10,000 tablets a day, for a total of 905,000 between January and March, had made it the number-one tablet supplier in India, with a 15.3 percent market share. Like the crow, the Aakash project’s ingenuity and persistence may solve seemingly intractable problems.