Road to India@100: Finger on the digital pulse
Post-Covid-19, india is beginning to take big steps. It has not only discovered confidence in terms of dealing with adversities and challenges but has come out stronger on the other side of the storm. India finds itself as the fastest-growing economy, having delivered 2.1 billion vaccines manufactured in India, having received the highest amount of FDI and having created an innovation ecosystem that is the third largest in the world. India in 2023 is an India with reimagined ambitions for itself. So, this idea and vision of New India which was spoken about even pre-Covid-19, is becoming real in the time that we live in. As the world’s economies, enterprises and governments are digitising rapidly, India finds itself looking at a world full of opportunities. There is a phrase in warfare, amongst fighter pilots, about a ‘target-rich environment’ and this is an ‘opportunity-rich environment’ for India and India’s tech ecosystem. This is fuelling the confidence in the reimagined ambitions going forward.
Our aim is to move from being a consumer of tech to becoming an architect and producer of tech, and achieve the $1-trillion digital economy goal, including $300 billion in electronics manufacturing by 2025-26. The most important element is that for the first time, we have a political leadership describing the coming years as India’s Techade—a decade full of technological progress. This entire Techade and the economic activity will be built by young Indians. In the past when we looked at the economy, it was always about Tata or Birla, or a few big firms. But when the PM talks about the India Techade, he is referring to a digital economy that will be built by young talent building their first firms. This is a significant departure from almost 60-65 years of a known economic model that India operated under. So that’s one significant element of what will drive where we are going to be in 2047.
It was just a few years ago when India was described as a country that was very strong in IT and ITeS. We had a few large companies that created jobs and a large footprint in terms of clients and customers all over the world. But we were a unidimensional digital economy for many years.
While the IT and ITeS part of the economy continues to grow, we now have a digital innovation economy that is growing at a robust rate. It attracted the highest ever FDI and has the third-highest number of unicorns and start-ups in the world. Besides, 5G, electronics manufacturing, micro-electronics and semiconductor manufacturing will also be a significant part of the digital economy.
Looking further, our innovation ecosystem is creating a totally awe-inspiring opportunity in the AI and ML space. All of this and the fact that the internet is poised to lead to Web 3.0 creates another opportunity for us. An important footnote of this is that we have now evolved from being the back offices of the world and consumers of technology to confidently striding to the front office, and even to occupying leadership roles. We want to become architects, producers, and designers of platforms that have solutions, products, components and devices that span the entire digital economy ecosystem.
The global demand for digital products and services will lead to a demand for digital talent. One of the key focus areas for us is that we want Indian talent to be not just low-cost talent (as was the case with IT/ITeS earlier), but really be the best-in-class, leading the way in new areas of high-performance computing, AI computing, blockchain…where talent and quality of talent are the determining factors. Today, every enterprise, government and consumer is competing. Technology is the enabler of competitiveness and everyone wants the best talent to design, construct, develop and execute their platforms and solutions.
Another key trend is that young people will not be heading to Silicon Valley, rather there will be significant interest for them to come and work in India. There is going to be almost a tectonic change from India being an exporter of talent to Indian talent wanting to cooperate with the rest of the world and build the solutions and ideas of the future. The underlying premise of all this is that the intensity of tech in our lives, in enterprises, and business models is only going to get deeper.
The Prime Minister’s objectives were very clear in 2015 that he wanted technology to transform the lives of our citizens in terms of governance and democracy, and be an enabler of opportunities for young Indians. Even I did not believe that we would travel this far. That we would emerge as one of the pre-eminent nations to use tech for governance and development, and the world would look at us as a trusted partner in technology. So much so that we would be at a stage where seven countries of the world would want the India Stack to be implemented in their systems. This is the same country (India) that just some years ago would buy everything from the US or the UK or Germany, as the case may be.
But the narrative has turned on its head now. The statement of UAE’s digital minister, “The future of technology will have Indian fingerprints everywhere ” aptly captures the India story, and shows how the world is looking at India, today.
As told to Nidhi Singal. Chandrasekhar is Union Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology and Skill Development & Entrepreneurship
