One of India’s leading IT companies – HCL has expressed deep desire and interest to bid for Aakash II tablets. This desire was expressed by HCL after Expression of Interest (EoI) was shown by the government of India.
At the ISA Vision Summit, 2012, a senior company official said that HCL may offer its expertise in manufacturing such devices as the amount of business that it would get would be huge as the demand for the tablet has already crossed one million mark.
According to Mr Kapil Sibal, the government plans to launch Aakash 2 which would be the successor of Aakash 2 tablets. The Aakash 2 tablets would be much faster and efficient as compared to the older version of Aakash. Sibal also added that the price of Aakash 2 would be in the range of around Rs 1500 from the older version of Rs 2276 as the demand of Aakash 2 would go up from current demand of 1 million.
According to Sibal, “Today Electronics is the largest and fastest growing manufacturing industry in the world. Current global hardware production is around $ US 1.75 trillion and by 2020 it is going to grow up to $ US 2.4 trillion. On the domestic front, electronic driven industry has emerged as the contributor to national economy,”.
He further added, “We can develop semiconductor manufacturing in India since we have the chip design services available here and enormous high quality human resource. We should be able to leverage that to ensure that we can develop the semiconductor manufacturing sector in India.”