Global technology veterans call India an innovation hub
NEW DELHI: East or west, when it comes to innovation, India is the best! This was the sentiment echoed by the technology industry veterans at a two-day technology summit, EmTech India, organised by MIT Technology Review and Mint. The event was marked by the presence of global technology leaders like Cisco Systems executive chairman John Chambers, Intel India president Kumud M. Srinivasan, Microsoft India chairman Bhaskar Pramanik, Freecharge founder Kunal Shah, Tech Mahindra’s C PG ur nani and Google X Labs senior advisor Jack Hidary, who joined in through Skype.
Ajay Kumar, additional secretary, department of electronics and information technology said India has all the right building blocks to become technologically advanced nation.
RS Sharma, chairman of Trai, said India is moving towards its goal of becoming a digitally connected country. “It is evident that the country now has more than a billion mobiles and data (consumption) is growing at 65% annually. This shows there is a massive interest in accessing services such as e-commerce and e-learning,” he said.
Going all praise for the steps taken by the Modi government to boost start up environment in India, Chambers said, “If you want to do a startup, this is the right time; the inflection point has a just happened.”
Global tech czars saw India as the place to be in terms of innovation and technology. Jack Hidary, founder and chairman, Samba Energy and senior adviser, Google X Labs, said terming India as a moonshot economy, “India right now is going through a radical transformation the likes of what we have never seen. This is very different than what is happening in China or any other country in the world. It is a combination smartphones, digital payments, broadband and power of energy storage coming together.”
Hidary said a lot of factors are coming together to make India the moonshot economy, which include mobile internet, entrepreneurial activity, investments, and the government that understands, where it needs to go to in future. Veterans batted for a change in the existing structure of the industry. CP Gurnani of Tech Mahindra said, “We are now seeing the demolition of existing industry and creation of technology-driven industry. The quality of start ups in India coming up in sectors like healthcare, energy etc are phenomenal.”
While bureaucrats see India making rapid transition toward digitalization, they appeared conscious about the challenges that programmes like Digital India is facing.
“The government is conscious that Digital India will not be successful if people at large do not participate in it. We wanted to make 50 lakh people digitally literate in five years and we are going to achieve that in just one-and-a-half years,” said Ajay kumar, additional secretary, department of electronics and information technology.