Nearly 97,000 laptops meant for distribution to school and college students under the State government's scheme have been received by the authorities.
As soon as the laptops clear the process of verification by a third party, they will be despatched to colleges. Initially, they will be given to final year students of colleges.
Though contracts were awarded to six vendors in November, last year's floods in Thailand, the major centre of manufacturing of hard disk, came in the way of the vendors to agree to the original delivery schedule. Most of them had even refused to commit themselves formally. Now, all these hurdles have been overcome and the delivery schedule has been revised.
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An official says that till now, about 12,400 laptops were despatched to the colleges.
As per the scheme, 12th standard students of government and government-aided schools and students of government and government-aided arts and science, engineering and polytechnic colleges would be provided laptops. As per the original plan, 9.12 lakh laptops were to be distributed to students. This has been revised to 9.07 lakhs.
At the time of launch six months ago, 6,875 laptops were given away through a short-term tender.
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For the supply of laptops, the authorities, through tendering process last year, selected six vendors - Lenovo India (3,00,000 laptops); HCL Infosystems and Acer India (2,00,000 each); RP Infosystems (75,000); Hewlett-Packard India (approximately 66,000) and Wipro (50,000).
As regards another flagship scheme of the government, the scheme of free distribution of mixies, wet grinders and electric fans, 10 lakh electrical appliances each were now distributed. The Civil Supplies Corporation has received about 12.5 lakh fans, 19.9 lakh mixies ad 19.6 lakh grinders from suppliers. As the plan is to give the three appliances as a package to every beneficiary, the figure of 10 lakh has been touched. Given the increase in the rate of supply of appliances, the official is hopeful of covering the remaining 15 lakh by the end of next month.