NEW DELHI – \u201cAt first, even I didn\u2019t think it was possible,\u201d quipped Suneet Singh Tuli, maker of the world\u2019s cheapest net access and computing device priced at just $45. But he is talking of the old times when the idea of a cheap computer was still laughable for a world brought up on the staple diet of hi-tech devices that serve more as symbols than anything else.<\/p>\n
Today, everything is possible. \u201cIf India can usher in a mobile revolution, why not an Internet revolution? A rickshaw puller, who has a cell phone today, can have a computer tomorrow. Our client is not the man who can afford the iPhone. Our client is the man on the street who still reveres the computer.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe want to end that reverence by making the device as simple as a toy – that common, that easy,\u201d said the Ludhiana-born, 43-year-old Sikh entrepreneur, who, along with his brother Raja Tuli, gave body to India\u2019s vision of producing cheap laptops as educational tools for the poorest of students.<\/p>\n
The government was looking for $35 bid, but $49.98 was the closest it got, with Tuli bagging the contract. \u201cI still remember that day. I was in the lounge of IIT Rajasthan at Jodhpur waiting for the results when the other lowest bidders started teasing me. They asked me if I had done the calculations right. I was so anxious that I called my brother back home in North Alberta to check. Luckily, all went well,\u201d recounted Suneet, whose family migrated from Ludhiana to Iran in 1976.<\/p>\n
Few would know that their first business venture was \u201cWitefax\u201d, the world\u2019s biggest fax machine which the Guinness recorded as such in 1992. Ask Suneet of its history and he says, \u201cNecessity is the mother of invention. In 1989, the fax machine had just appeared, but it could not do our engineering documents. So we invested in a project to develop our kind of machine which turned out to be the biggest world over.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
NEW DELHI – \u201cAt first, even I didn\u2019t think it was possible,\u201d quipped Suneet Singh Tuli, maker of the world\u2019s cheapest net access and computing device priced at just $45.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,17],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n