Chennai: Tamil Nadu will roll out the first batch of free laptops to college students by October, with three global companies Dell, HP, and Acer competing in the tender.

While sources said one of these three firms quoted the lowest price of 23,000 per laptop, officials maintained the bidder will be known only after work orders are issued. K P Karthikeyan, managing director, ELCOT, said the bidding is in its final stages and the govt will likely roll out the distribution of laptops by Oct. “We will announce the lowest bidder soon once the work orders are issued,” he said.

The govt will distribute 10 lakh laptops in the first phase, and another 10 lakh later. The contractor will also have to set up district-wise maintenance centres and a web portal for students to raise grievances. The spare parts have to be shipped within a few days, and the status of complaints must be live on the portal.

The companies distributing the laptops will supply processors equal to or above Intel Core i3 or AMD Ryzen, with a minimum RAM of eight gigabytes. The laptops shall be 14 inches or 15.6 inches, and they must have at least one USB C-type port for fast file transfers. These laptops are more modern than the ones provided in the past, which came with dual-core processors and a 2GB RAM, unlike the ones now, which come with four-core processors with 8GB RAM, which can help students stream 4K videos and edit videos. The students will also get a free one-year subscription to Microsoft Office 365.