NEW DELHI and NEW YORK CITY—On rural Indian roads, a farmer occasionally comes along riding in an improvised vehicle, jury-rigged from bullock carts, irrigation pumps and whatever else is at hand. These vehicles, known in Hindi as jugaad, are iconic of a long tradition of frugal innovation in India, where machines are often repurposed in ways manufacturers had not intended, and almost nothing is thrown away. Lately, jugaad has come to signify any sort of low-cost, ingenious innovation out of India, encompassing everything from providing software services at costs that cannot be matched in the West to the rollout of the popular Tata Nano car.

The latest example of frugal Indian innovation is a low-cost handheld computer that the government says will cost only 1,500 rupees (about $35). Kapil Sibal​, India's minister of human resources development (whose portfolio includes education), unveiled it publicly at the end of July, with government officials subsequently saying it will launch in January. The device has attracted attention—and skepticism—because of its remarkably low price. And some Indian government officials will not be satisfied until the price falls to $10.

Under the Harvard-educated Sibal, who previously headed the Ministry of Science and Technology, the government of India has embarked on a national mission to improve the quality of education in India. It has upgraded the salaries of teachers, quickened the hiring process, and created new centers of engineering education. One of Sibal's goals has been to ensure that more of the 220 million children enrolled in Indian schools go on to college, as he reiterated on a visit to New York City this past week. The low-cost handheld computer is one of his high-profile initiatives.

Dubbed Sakshat, the tablet has a resistive touch screen, seemingly inspired by Apple's iPad. It comes in a ruggedized plastic casing, has two gigabytes of flash memory, two USB ports, along with headphone and video output jacks and Wi-Fi capability. Sakshat uses the Android operating system and consumes a meager two watts of power, which is supplied by an internal lithium-ion battery that could be charged using a solar-powered charger, says N. K. Sinha, the ministry official in charge of the project.

Sinha says the Indian government wants to provide broadband access and low-cost access devices across all government-funded colleges and universities in India as educational aids. India dominates the global market for business process outsourcing and software services, yet most students at Indian colleges and universities cannot afford a laptop.

Low cost, tall order
Previous efforts to build low-cost computers have been plagued by cost overruns. The most famous of these attempts, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, was launched by Nicholas Negroponte of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab in 2005. OLPC said it would deliver a laptop for $100, but when mass production started in 2007 the price had risen to $188 (when bought in bulk). Subsequent attempts have lowered the price somewhat, but no one has succeeded in delivering a laptop at a price comparable to $35. (Currently, the CVS drugstore chain is marketing a Sylvania Netbook for $99.)

Sinha credits Negroponte for the "original paradigm shift" in lower-cost personal computers. Still, he explains, even if Negroponte had been successful in meeting the $100 target, the Indian government could not have afforded OLPC laptops for the huge student population. Estimates put the number of students in higher education around 12 million to 14 million.

When the Indian government decided it wanted to develop its own low-cost computer, Sinha was sent to M.I.T. to learn from the OLPC project. He realized that some hard questions would have to be asked if the target cost was to be achieved. "It's a question of mind-set," he says. "Why do I need to build capacity in every device? Can we use cloud computing? Do we need number-crunching ability?"

Design teams began work in 2007 with the original $10 goal. In February 2009 the government unveiled its first attempt, which it said would cost $10. The device did not get good reviews.