Cheap and Chalu - 2.0

Cheap and Chalu seems to be the new mantra of modern India.
Today Indian government unveiled the new $10 laptops which would give a big boost to the education facilities at our rural and backward areas.

While the world was going gaga over Nicolas Negroponte’s One Laptop per Child (OLPC) and the XO machines, launched with a mission "To create educational opportunities for the world's poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning", here is India's answer to it, that too at one-fifth of the price.

Before this this, it was Chandrayaan, our satellite developed by ISRO which silenced all the critics from all corners of the world and proved itself to be 100% efficient is its very first attempt. May be it’s the confidence of the ISRO team, that they launched it without even taking an insurance cover!

Last year, Indian IT and Computer hardware major, HCL created news with the then cheapest Laptop called MiLEAP X for just Rs 13,990.

Indian telecom player Spice unveiled a groundbreaking product range of mobile including the world’s cheapest phone, called the People’s Phone - a mobile handset, sans screen display for as less as Rupees 500. The people’s phone coincidentally also comes in a braille edition.

Even Indian defense weaponry is one of the cheapest in the world. The new American F/A-22 Raptor stealth fighter costs Rs 480 crore. The Rafale multi-role jet being inducted into the French Air Force and Navy, in turn, notches about Rs 270 crore. The price tag for the French Mirage-2000 and the Swedish JAS-39 Gripen also hovers between Rs 130 crore and Rs 160 crore. In contrast, despite huge time and cost overruns, the indigenous Light Combat Aircraft "Tejas" costs only Rs 100-110 crore. Can't comment of their relative performance though..

Now I needn’t quote TATA Nano here, the whole world knows about it.

What’s common between all the above is that, we try to develop our indigenous technology which is cheap and efficient just like the famous incident – while Russians used pencils, NASA spent millions of dollar to develop a “space” pen for its astronauts.
From an economist’s point of view, what can help India further in this cause - is that we have such a huge domestic market that we can go for higher economies of scale. With the growing economy and the increase in purchase power of people we can expect sales for all products and services to grow higher. The establishment cost for all such productions are just one time investments.
Thinking of it, if we plan to make every citizen of our country get essential clothing, we can actually make it is possible. All we need to do is establish a large loom and continuously generate the same cloth (same texture and colour), now this cuts a lot of cost and then adding a little subsidy or cross subsiding it, we can make sure that we do not have any naked Indian.
Likewise we can have shoe factory, producing the just 1 type of shoes (or chappals) for all.
Similarly for food, if we have a baking house to manufacture the same type of bread for all people below poverty line and distribute it through out the country via proper distribution channels and reach it would solve the starvation to a great extent.
The list is endless; if we keep encouraging innovations and also try achieve such economies of scale we would definitely be able to provide better services and more importantly at very low cost.

The land of the poor :-(

“Jobs arrived in India barefoot and threadbare. This is how he chose to dress, as an expression of a specific ideal or aesthetic. In India he was confronted for the first time with people who were poor – not the way California hippies were poor, by choice, but poor by fate. It was an eye-opener for him. The complete contrast with the material comforts of American life was intense and shocking, and it challenged everything he thought he knew up to that moment.”
The above is an excerpt from the book iCon by Jeffrey S. Young and William L. Simon. The book is about Steve Jobs, the man behind the company which challenged the way people thought and gave them things beyond their imagining, Apple. He came to India much earlier than he became the man the world recognizes today, in search of peace, in search of true knowledge, in search of his ‘guru’. It has been many years since then. Governments have changed, people have become more ‘educated’, industries have been flourishing; money has been flowing now in India like never before. Today the world talks about Ambanis and Mittals and the world of technology has had the Indian impact in the western world which even Jobs recognizes today.
So, what would be the picture in front of Steve Jobs if he happened to visit India in the near future? He would perhaps land on the Mumbai airport, his plane caressing the world’s largest slum, Dharavi. He would then be escorted to his hotel and along the roads would notice small children thrust into begging. As a face of the technology world, he may want to visit the mecca of Indian technology, Bangalore. He better choose either to go on a chopper or make a trip at the time of a public holiday else the traffic would kill the good old man! And ironically, these are just the few of the ‘best’ places that any visitor to India may want to see. The Himalayas and the other tourist attractions are replete with so much commotion nowadays that the ‘firangis’ are easily baffled.
Today we may be able to boast of some of the richest men of the world belonging to India, but the fact remains that poverty is not abating. The number of people living below the poverty line is increasing by the hour. ‘Every fourth poor is an Indian’ has become a cliché (and is sadly true). Diseases like AIDS, cancer are engulfing the urban and rural alike and we still feel ashamed to discuss sex in front of our children while make no fuss about the tobacco that we smoke even with little children at home. Beggary is a bigger ‘industry’ than 'khadi'. The money is indeed flowing into our economy and India is getting rich but the percolation of this huge wealth is not yet happening. Add to these the troubled borders of India. Surrounded by arch rivals, petty beggars, infiltrators, have-nots, politically unstable nations and those that have a long history of stabbing on the back, India is indeed not in the situation which most of the European nations enjoy (with all of them surging forward competitively). Add to this our internal security threats and civil agitations like the ‘gujjar’ uproar recently. Sadly for India, though a lot of positive things are happening, we still are years behind the true independence that every human being dreams of; the true happiness is still elusive.