Canadian entrepreneur puts education in the hands of millions of people with low-cost tablets

According to the Record " When Suneet Singh Tuli’s son needs to learn a math concept he didn’t understand in school, he turns to the most popular educational resource of our time: YouTube. Type in what you want to learn in YouTube, and immediately, videos come up on the subject. That’s how people learn today. Yet Tuli, whose family came to Canada from India when he was a boy, knows there are hundreds of millions of children in developing countries who don’t have access to either the internet or good quality education.Their parents may have cellphones, and there are wireless cellphone networks that could deliver the internet, but families don’t have the computer devices to connect to it. Tuli made it his mission to change that.

He is the co-founder of Datawind Ltd., a company that has become famous for putting the inexpensive Aakash and Ubislate 7 tablet computers on the market in India.

On Friday, Tuli spoke in Kitchener on the trials and triumphs of Datawind, at an event hosted by Canada’s Technology Triangle, an economic development organization.

Worldwide media fame for Datawind came in 2011, with a contract to sell 100,000 Aakash tablet computers for about $40 to the government of India. The Indian government planned to subsidize them and provide them to students for only $35. In a country where millions of people make less than $200 a month, that’s huge.

But Datawind faced big setbacks in getting funding, in production delays and disputes with the government over the tablet’s capabilities. India is not an easy place to do business, even if you come from India, Tuli said.

A lot of people derided the company and said it couldn’t be done.

“I misjudged the detractors. I misjudged how mean-spirited some people could be. It caught me off-guard,” Tuli said.

But the company went on, and became successful despite its initial troubles.

Tuli says almost all of the tablets promised to the Indian government will be delivered by the end of this month. “There might be 10 or 20 per cent that will be delivered soon thereafter.”

Meanwhile, the Ubislate tablet, a more deluxe version that is sold commercially starting at about $60, is selling like hotcakes.

“Right now we are shipping 2,500 to 3,000 units a day,” Tuli said. The company is now the third largest supplier of tablet computers in India and has about 10 per cent of the market share.

Datawind is officially based in the United Kingdom, but its research and development centre is in Montreal, where the touch screen portion of the tablet is made.

The reason that Datawind’s tablets are so inexpensive is that it aims to make something that is “good enough,” as opposed to trying to compete with the iPad. It won’t have the powerful “dual core” processors of today’s iPad. But the processor that was in the original iPads is still pretty good, and Datawind can get it for only about $4. The tablet doesn’t have bells and whistles of an iPad, but it has email, internet browser and all the basics, and looks and feels just like a more expensive tablet.

Datawind negotiated with a cellular network operator in India to provide people with an unlimited mobile data plan for about $2 per month. Tuli wants to get that price down to zero, by getting advertising and apps to generate revenue for the company. Datawind is not a charity. “We have to make this a sustainable business,” Tuli says.

But he is also a devout Sikh, and education is highly valued in the Sikh religion. So putting a powerful education tool in the hands of billions of poor people in developing countries is his passion.

“This is more than just a company to me now,” he says."