Akhilesh Yadav starts giving free laptops

Utter Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav today gave away the Hewitt-Packard laptops, worth Rs 19,000 each to close to 10,000 students from colleges in Lucknow. Over the next eight months, the UP government will give away nearly 15 lakh laptops to first-year college students.

For HP, the laptop deal is a great opportunity to win marketshare. “The deal will impact the market dynamics in a big way. In the PC space, it will give an edge to HP over its competitors,” says Sumanta Mukherjee, lead analyst–IT Practice Research, Cyber Media Research (CMR) India.

HP has manufactured a part of these devices at its Pant Nagar facility which has an installed base of 3.6 mn laptops. “The deal has a social side and will help bridge the digital divide in the biggest state in India. The PC penetration will automatically leapfrog to a next level,” says Rajiv Srivastava, VP & GM, HP India Printing and Personal Systems (PPS) Group.

The laptops being handed over to the students in UP are: HP Pavilion G4-10064AU notebooks which has a 14 inch display, Windows 7,  2GB internal memory, 500 GB hard disk capacity, two cameras, six hours battery back-up, 3G and wi-fi support. 

Besides, it includes three USB ports, a port for microphone jack, a VGA, one headphone or speaker output apart from the AC power slot, a DVD Read and Write optical drive and supports three languages: Hindi, Urdu and English. But the event had kicked off a new controversy.

The laptops come bundled with stickers of the chief minister and his father, Mulayam Singh who head the Samajwadi Party. This will certainly create ripples in the political circles.