The answer was yes. Last month, Kalra’s team — led by two I.I.T. Rajasthan electrical engineering professors, one of whom comes from a village that still has no electricity — unveiled the Aakash tablet. Aakash is Hindi for sky. It’s based on the Android 2.2 operating system, with a 7-inch touch screen, three hours of battery life and the ability to download YouTube videos, PDFs and educational software like Virtual Labs. The government will subsidize the wireless connections for students.

Image Thomas L. Friedman Credit... Josh Haner/The New York Times

If Indians could only purchase tablets made in the West, the price points would be so high they’d never spread here, said Kalra, so “we had to break the price point” in a big way. They did it by taking full advantage of today’s hyperconnected world: pulling commodity parts mainly from China and South Korea, using open-source software and collaboration tools and employing the design/manufacturing/assembly abilities of two companies in the West — DataWind and Conexant Systems — and Quad in India.

The Aakash is a ray of hope that India can leverage technology to get more of its 220 million students enough tools to escape poverty and poor teaching, but it’s also a challenge to the West.

In terms of hope, I was struck by a story that Kalra’s wife, Urmila, told about a chat she had had with their maid after the Aakash was unveiled on Oct. 5. As Urmila recalled, her maid, who has two young children, said that she had heard “from the night watchman that Mr. Kalra has made a computer that is very cheap, and is so cheap that even she can afford to buy it. The watchman had given her a picture from the paper, and she asked me if it was true.”

Urmila told her it was true and that the machine was meant for people who could not afford a big computer. Added Urmila: “She asked, ‘How much will it cost?’ I said, ‘It will cost you around 1,500 rupees.’ [$30.] She said: ‘15,000 or 1,500?’ I said, ‘1,500.’ She was sure that if the government was doing something so good for the poor, it had to have a catch. ‘What can you do on it?’ she asked me. I said, ‘If your daughter goes to school, she can use it to download videos of class lessons,’ just like she had seen my son download physics lectures every week from M.I.T.’s [OpenCourseWare]. I said, ‘You have seen our son sitting at the computer listening to a teacher who is speaking. That teacher is actually in America.’ She just kept getting wider- and wider-eyed. Then she asked me will her kids be able to learn English on it. I said, ‘Yes, they will definitely be able to learn English,’ which is the passport for upward mobility here. I said, ‘It will be so cheap you will be able to buy one for your son and one for your daughter!’ ”