Aakash: Made in China, assembled in India?

A new wave of controversy has hit the world's lowest cost tablet Aakash. There are questions raised over India's low-cost tablet being made in India. However, Datawind's Suneet Singh Tuli denied the allegations that the tablet is made in China stating it's an attempt to sabotage India's image.

Tuli told Prasanto K Roy of Cybermedia: "For the first 10k units for IIT, and for expediency 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. We finished this batch of 10k units and delivered them to IIT and will be starting another batch of 20k units for them in two weeks."

Further, he said: "We have been strong proponents of developing a manufacturing base in India, and our actions continue to reflect this. It looks like these allegations are a desperate attempt by somebody to sabotage the image of India, and we would urge you not to fall prey to such attempts."

Commenting on the delay in assembling of the Aakash 2 units, he said: "We also have four partner manufacturers across India that will work on the deliveries to the government but we just couldn't get them started to assemble our new Aakash 2 units in time but they will start to ship early in December."

Aakash is an Android tablet manufactured by British company Datawind. After receiving mixed reactions to the Aakash tablet, MHRD Ministry and DataWind stepped up the manufacturing of a faster and better tablet at a very similar price point. The Aakash 2 is priced at Rs 1,130 for college students, after a 50% government subsidy over the purchase price from DataWind. The equivalent UbiSlate 7ci sells commercially for Rs 4,499, reflecting a further 50% markup.

"We launched our low cost tablets in India a year ago which was and still is the lowest cost tablet in the world. These were built in India including all the circuit-boards in Hyderabad. This was based on a 360 Mhz Arm CPU. The next generation to that had an 800MHz Arm Cortex A8 CPU and all the boards were made in Hyderabad also," Tuli said.

"The primary difference between Aakash I and 2 is the Capacitive Touch Screen. This is the most expensive and important element and this product is manufactured in our Montreal facility (Videos are uploaded on Youtube: and )," he said.

The new controversy has hit the Aakash tablet a week after Datawind promised that the commercial version of the Aakash tablet will be delivered within 4-6 weeks to consumers who have already made the payment.

The Aakash2 uses the A13 chip, which has become the standard among low cost tablets. The software and mechanical parts are developed by Datawind and the motherboards utilize Datawind's approved designs based on A13 reference, according to Tuli.