Thiruvananthapuram: For the first time in the country, laptops and projectors deployed to schools in the state will have a five-year comprehensive warranty which includes the battery and power adapter for the laptop and the lamp/bulb of the projectors. The entire proceedings of the first part of the IT tender, as part of the Hi Tech school programme under the Public Education Rejuvenation Mission of the state government, conducted by the Kerala Infrastructure and Technology for Education (KITE), the largest of its kind in the state, was completed in a record time of 2.5 months.
The laptops will feature Intel Core-i3 6th Generation or higher processor. The tender proceedings to procure of 60,250 laptops and 43,750 multimedia projectors which would transform 45,000 classrooms in 4,775 schools to hi-tech was released to successful bidders on Thursday as per the KITE Director Board decision. The competitive bidding in the national level tendering of laptops and projectors saw the active participation of top four major brands in laptops and three leading brands in projectors.
Out of these bidders, the best price for Laptop was quoted by ACS Technologies for Acer model Laptop atr Rs 24,960 plus 18 per cent GST and that of projectors was Rs 17,750 plus 18 per cent GST which was quoted by Uneecops Technologies for BenQ model Projector. KELTRON, the second Bidder in Projector has agreed to match the lowest price and hence as per the tender conditions, 40 percent of the orders for Projectors would be released to them. The technical committee chaired by Prof. Jayasankar, constituted by the state government, had supervised the tender proceedings.
In the Detailed Project Report of Hi-Tech school programme approved by KIIFB for a total estimated cost of Rs 493.50 Crore, an amount of Rs 299.95 crore was set apart for laptops and projectors. However, the final price received for the same after the tender is Rs 228.04 crore excluding the taxes, which in other words translates to a reduction of Rs 71.91 crore that is 23.97 per cent less than the original approved estimate.
The Laptops would be pre-loaded with Free and Open Source
Software (FOSS) Operating System in lieu of proprietory software,
where the latter would have costed Rs.1.50 Lakhs in each machine as an
additional expense. Through this initiative the State Exchequer would
effectively have a savings of upto Rs.900 Crore.
K.Anvar Sadath, Vice Chairman and Executive Director, KITE told Deccan
Chronicle that the five year comprehensive warranty on the equipments
ensures that the schools would not be having any liability towards the
maintenance of these machines. KITE would set-up the Call center and
Web -portal for addressing the issues reported from schools. If any
issue reported from schools remained unresolved within the stipulated
time, a penalty of Rs.100 per day would be levied from the respective
companies, which has been clearly defined in the tender document. With
the issue of the Supply Orders for 60,250 Laptops and 43,750
Projectors, KITE has completed all the activities for transforming
20,000 Classrooms into Hi-Tech by the month of January 2018.”, said Mr
Sadath
