Indian students pose with the supercheap Aakash tablet computers, which they received during the Oct. 5 product launch in New Delhi. The Indian government intends to deliver 10 million tablets to college students across India at a subsidized price of $35.

India has unveiled what its government says is the world's cheapest tablet computer, along with a promise to make the device available to the country's college students, and possibly, to those in high school as well. The government says it's a major step toward bridging the country's gigantic digital divide.

The tablet is called "Aakash," the Hindi word for "sky," and boosters say it could give Internet access to billions of people.

See the full report in NPR at: Will Cheap Computer Bridge India's Digital Divide? and listen to the story, too.

Fallen by the wayside of urban India’s information technology (IT) superhighway, Khairat village – located just 80 kilometres from booming Mumbai – still has no access to the Internet.

But thanks to the recent efforts of ‘one laptop per child’ – a project of the Miami-based non-profit One Laptop per Child Association Inc., which aims to digitally empower youth in the global south – Zore and 25 other students in his nondescript village school can now vie with their technology-savvy peers in urban India.

See:

Massive Digital Divide in the Land of IT or http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=105725

e-GRAM - Bridging the Digital Divide in Gujarat

Read the full article at: e-GRAM - Bridging the Digital Divide in Gujarat

"The biggest reason for the success of e-Gram project is the fact that the whole system is in Gujarati. It was not easy and it took some time to build the whole platform in Gujarati. This huge task was done by DEV Information Technology Pvt Ltd. "

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AHMEDABAD: Just a click of a mouse could get you access to 55,000 books, 2,100 different leading journals and periodicals, 1.2 crore union catalogue listings, 2,000 theses across leading universities and technical colleges in the country and most of all 15,000 video lectures in 77 disciplines. This is the ideal library that most colleges dream of.

But even though such a library exists, not many colleges in Gujarat seem to be aware of it. The Information and Library Network Centre (INFLIBNET) is a storehouse of information and its e-services have made accessing all this information a lot easier. A college has to pay an annual token fee of just Rs 5,000 to allow thousands of students to access this rich repository of academic works. But till date only 108 colleges in the state have subscribed to the centre's N-List services.

The INFLIBNET's rich repository had attracted search engine giant Google's attention and last year it entered into an MoU with Google to list almost 30 lakh IndCat catalogue listings on their website. The project would be completed in a month."

Read the full article in the Times of India at:

Limitless library, limited response

:Making rapid strides in the Indian education sector, India's largest global education company, Core Projects and Technologies Limited (CORE) has crossed a major milestone crossing a tally of over 9,000 schools in India in a record span of just over a year.

CORE has bagged its second large contract from Gujarat Government to implement Computer Aided Learning (CAL) in 3236 Primary Schools in the State of Gujarat for Rs. 124 cr. CORE is already present in 645 schools in Gujarat through an earlier Information and Communication Technology (ICT) contract. The company has also bagged similar CAL & ICT contracts for 2,622 schools in Haryana, 1,250 in Punjab, 947 in Maharashtra, 267 in Meghalaya, and 73 schools in Nagaland."

Read the full article at:

CORE Projects bags order worth Rs. 1.24bn from Gujarat Govt