Govt. to give netbooks to 4000 students

I read an article in newspaper that the govt. has decided to provide netbooks instead of tablet computers under initiative announced in the Budget to promote computer & Information Technology literacy among students. Under this scheme 4000 meritorious students of class XI will be provided with netbooks free of cost. The students will be selected on the basis of merit in the class X examination of the state board of school education. The decision to go for netbooks was taken by keeping in view the convenience of students who had been well acquainted with  the windows operating system and various softwares of microsoft company. Tablets mostly use their own operating systems. Moreover, netbooks are 20-25 % cheaper than tablet computers, which was quite significant. There were three bidders : Hewlett Packard (Rs. 16,720) , HCL Technologies (Rs 18,050) and Wipro(Rs. 20,656) which quoted higher rates.

                The selected netbooks will have 10.1 inch LED display screen, 2GB RAM, 320GB harddisk, 1.6 GHz dual core processor, Wi-Fi, bluetooth and other facilities and have a 6 cell battery with 8 hour backup. It will be preloaded with the course content, MS-Office, other softwares, encyclopaedia and English dictionary. The implementation of the scheme will entail an expenditure of 6.40 crore. I think the decision by govt. to give netbooks will be beneficial to students.