But the investor and customer commitments needed to get the machine into serious production have not emerged, and even a charity-funded Simputer rollout has been delayed.
The Simputer, whose name is an acronym for Simple, Inexpensive, Multilingual Computer, was launched in April 2001 and the licensees then said sales would begin by November.
That didn't happen.
"We need to sell in large numbers to be able to bring down the price to the promised level of $200; otherwise it will cost more," said Swami Manohar, a professor at the Indian Institute of Science and founder of Picopeta Simputers, one of two companies licensed to make the device. "Such big orders have not come."
The other Simputer licensee, Encore Software, has yet to find a manufacturing partner.
Using non-proprietary software including the Linux operating system and designed to be shared by multiple users, the Simputer was touted at its launch as a powerful enabling tool.
With it, Indian farmers would get on the Internet via public telephones and do business, checking produce prices and tax and land records, among other uses. The device accommodates smart cards so individual users could store their data separately.
Manohar said potential financial backers have shown little interest in providing the funds needed to develop different versions of the Simputer to suit specific needs and to develop relevant software.
"Big orders will automatically follow when such product development takes place, but each investor seems to be waiting and watching for someone else to take the lead," Manohar said.
He would not say how much money is required.
"Investors see risk in investing in a new product like this," Manohar said. "Nobody has built a computer for the rural and poor people. Also, there is no license for the hardware or software. That is probably the reason for their hesitation."
In the meantime, Manohar said, his company is working on a project to install several Simputer units in villages of the central Indian state of Chhatisgarh to kick start its use.
The Paris-based charity, South Asian Foundation, has promised to fund the project but it has been delayed for four months.
The Simputer was developed on the Open General License system to reduce its cost. Under the system, the applications in the Simputer are not copyrighted, allowing users to modify them for their own use.
To S. Devarajan, president of Manufacturers Association of Information Technology, a group of Indian hardware makers, the Simputer's usefulness has never been in doubt.
"It is a great product; it is affordable to the poor," he said. "Its power consumption is low, and it can run applications in Indian languages. It will be very widely used once it comes to the market."
Once it has funding, Picopeta has struck a deal with government-owned Bharat Electronics to manufacture the Simputer.
Shashank Garg, senior vice president of product development for Encore, said his company hoped to have a Simputer on the market in a few weeks.
"We have been building Simputer units in small numbers ourselves; these were for limited circulation," Garg said. "But we need to join hands with another company for manufacturing it."
Last year, Encore had said the Simputer would be available for consumers by November. But it pushed back the date several times.
The Simputer is based on Intel's Strong Arm processor. Prototypes have had a monochrome display, a hard polymer shell and 32 megabytes of random access memory. Running on AAA batteries, they included a built-in speaker, microphone, telephone jack and modem as well as USB and smart card connectors. Internet browsers and e-mail applications would be standard.
Among software that has been developed for the Simputer are applications covering electronic governance, literacy initiatives and dissemination of health information.
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