Its actually not that simple. All the areas in which India has produced innovation/breakthroughs under the aegis of a govt. agency have all been "special cases". For e.g India's atomic research programme comes under the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) which was created specifically to avoid bureaucratic hassles (it should have ideally been under the Ministry of Science & Tech, but operates autonomously). It is this agency which provided the funding and direction and enabled the scientists to focus on R&D rather than the bureaucracy. The tablet project, on the other hand, seems to me like a publicity stunt.

Unfortunately these guys are just hacking together a supplychain. So this will be very different from something like PSLV :(. They are not really doing any "innovation". If they can at least keep corruption at bay, these tablets will just increase the total number of tablets in use in India, especially among a set of people who may not choose to buy the tablets for themselves. That is good thing n the long run.