Leading laptop manufacturers - Acer, Dell and HP - are the three major OEMs set to supply ten lakh laptops for the Tamil Nadu government.

These laptops are likely to be distributed this month or in December to college students for free, said sources.

The State government plans to distribute nearly 20 lakh laptops over two years. The initial allocation is around ₹2,000 crore for the scheme, said sources.

This time, the State government has decided to go in for a higher configuration with Intel Core i3 configuration. Earlier it was Core 2 Duo and its equivalent now available is Celaron series However, the State government is not going for the Celaron series, and decided to go with i3 series with 256 GB SSD and 8 GB RAM.

The State government is procuring the laptops from the OEMs with per cost likely to be around ₹21,000, sources said. The distribution of ten lakh laptops is likely to be completed by March.

In 2011, Tamil Nadu was one of the first states to distribute free laptops to school and college students. So far, nearly 52 lakh laptops have been distributed to students in government and aided schools and colleges at a cost of over ₹7,000 crore.

Published on November 2, 2025