During the administration of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, the Department of Education (DepEd) had malicious over-priced deals with its suppliers. What caught our attention are the supplied PCs that cost PHP400,000 each unit for an obsolete configuration.
According to the exclusive report of News5, three suppliers of books and PCs had dealings with DepEd officials that expect million peso kickbacks from these overpriced supplies. Books are priced around PHP200-PHP300 but actually they should only cost around a hundred. Now the more surprising part, Pentium 4 PCs with Windows 98 are priced at staggering PHP400,000/unit.
Here is the PC configuration:
1.8Ghz Intel Pentium 4
128MB DDR
1.44 Floppy Disk Drive
52x CD-ROM Drive
56 kbps internal modem
40GB HDD
GeForce 4 w/ 128MB DDR
Windows 98 SE
A 21″ CRT monitor is also included plus other accessories like keyboard, mouse, microphone, speakers, and AVR. Well it’s a complete PC set but not for almost half-million even during the 2008-2010 era.
If we are to put it in today’s setting, PHP400,000 can give you four 27″ iMacs, three top-of-the-line gaming notebooks, two 6-core with dual GPU Mac Pro, or even a decent automobile. What would you rather have for education with PHP400,000?
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