It doesn’t take an engineer to realize that $10 per laptop will be a very ambitious project indeed. The current (and final) iteration of MIT’s OLPC stands at $176, 76 percent higher than originally estimated. The primary reason for the cost increase was hardware upgrades, with the machine now sporting a 433MHz AMD Geode processor, 256MB of RAM, 1GB of Flash storage, three USB ports, 802.11b/g, and an innovative dual-mode display.

Can India do it? The inner philanthropist hopes so, but the realist who buys technology says, “No way.” Why? Component prices are simply too high. The screen for the XO laptop, which is probably the single most innovative thing OLPC has to offer, was estimated to cost $28 per unit, in volume, by Merrill Lynch. OLPC has said that the complete motherboard/CPU package will cost roughly $75, and based on the Merrill Lynch estimates, it looks as though a third of that cost will be for the CPU alone. In other words, the CPU itself, the motherboard, the screen, the NAND flash storage, and the RAM… each of these costs more than $10 to manufacture for inclusion in the OLPC. India’s $10 price hopes appear to be nothing more than pure fantasy.

As it turns out, she and the skeptics were right. It appears that the prototype currently costs more than $20 dollars to produce and is missing input and display devices. Techtree’s article explains:

After being bombarded with various media reports about India’s very own $10 laptop, its time to get real.

The much-touted cheap computing device named “Sakshat” turned out to be a fancy “pen-drive” as The Times of India put it, with some bells and whistles. The details of the product, which are still not available, were unveiled by the Ministry of Human Resource Development at Tirupati recently.

As for the product, what you get for Rs.500 are the following: 2GB of storage memory, WiFi connectivity, Ethernet port(s) and USB connectivity. This is a far cry from the laptop it was touted to be. For starters, there is no screen on this one — so there goes the computing device mumbo-jumbo. What this means is that for it to display data stored on it, it will need a compatible output device (which could be a laptop!).

The “Sakshat” measures 10″x5″ and will be priced at $10 even though the manufacturing costs had reached almost $30. But then, thanks to a considerable cost cutting endeavor, the cost was finally bought down to $10.

On the surface it appears that the Indian government has clearly sold a bill of goods it can’t produce. However, while this may be true, there is still much about the project that should be intriguing. When one looks at the first two of the five Sakshat modules, not only have these modules been constructed, but they provide the basis for a rather powerful tool.

Sakshat press release…

Educational Resources:these help the learner to explore through the vast knowledge base available on the net in the form of e-books, e-journals, digital repository, digital library etc. Most of the sources listed are open source material.

Scholarship: this module is specifically meant for scholarship holders at national and state levels to keep track of their progress and keep them informed about other scholarship opportunities through news feeds and announcements.

This means that a tool that will provide access to e-books, e-journals, and online lessons, will have been created for somewhere near $10. I’m aware that people will immediately bring up the fact that there is no display and that inherently makes the Sakshat useless by itself. While this is true, the Sakshat, if it can be hooked up to a television becomes very useful. It wouldn’t be difficult to see this working very well in a family setting to provide an incredible educational opportunity.

During the next year or two, a cost-effective solution may be found to deal with the input and display issues. If a computer could be built for $40-50 it doesn’t seem like anyone has failed. This would bring unprecedented opportunities to hundreds of millions of people.

Scott Mcleod shares his thoughts in his blog.

Keep posted. Between OLPC’s XO, Sakshat, and netbooks, I believe we will be revisiting this topic quite often in the near future.