‘Covid accelerated digital adoption, but unequally’
NEW DELHI: The pandemic has accelerated digital adoption in India but we must realize that “it has not been equitable”, according to Natarajan Chandrasekaran, chairman of the Tata Sons board. “If you take education, all the urban kids who have access to a device or to a digital infrastructure could do online schooling, but equally, the large number of kids in the rural areas who don’t have access to devices who didn’t have access to the digital infrastructure lost years of schooling,” he added.
Chandrasekaran was in conversation with Anant Maheshwari, president, Microsoft India, at Microsoft’s Future Ready virtual conference on Tuesday.
He insisted that access to healthcare and education should be a national priority and everyone should contribute to it. “Government can put the policy infrastructure but the corporate sector has to play its part,” he said. He noted that a large section of the population is not participating in the market because of lack of access, adding, “tech will enable that access, and in the process expand the market significantly. More people will come into the formal economy.”
Chandrasekaran feels India will lead the global growth rates significantly for the whole decade. “India’s growth is going to be more fundamentally important going forward. Because even if the global growth is going to be good, it’s going to be a little bit behind the expected levels of 2021. India has a larger role to play,” he added.
According to him, there are many things going for India. For instance, “The pandemic per se has not really impacted the longterm growth trajectory of India. It has just delayed it. The fundamental factors, whether it is the formalization of the economy, the youth or more people coming into the middle income, all of these are totally intact.”
In October 2021, the IMF had projected India’s GDP to grow at 9.5% and 8.5% during 2021-22 and 2022-23, respectively, making it one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, Mint reported. Further, Chandrasekaran stressed the importance of making artificial intelligence (AI) and its subsets such as machine learning (ML) work for the masses. “This view that AI and ML is the software people’s job or that ML is for the elite should go. The focus should be on making AI and ML work for everybody, for field workers, truck drivers, all kinds of professionals in urban areas and rural areas,” he added. India doesn’t have the time or resources to keep building fiscal infrastructure, lamented Chandrasekaran. “If we have to achieve it now, the only way is to use the digital connection,” he said.