By Arun Gupta, founder and CEO of MoMAGIC Technologies, a Data Science and IoT company operating in India and South East Asia
The COVID-19 is deeply impacting the Indian Economy with an increased number of infected cases being reported every day and flattening of curve still at least a month away according to sector experts.
Recently, Indian Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi in his speech to the nation advised the country to become “Aatmanirbhar” or self-reliant, so dependency on other countries for essential and non-essential goods are minimized.
We believe one of the first sectors that will strive to become self-reliant is technology as many of the best resources in the world are already in India and with a good ecosystem of engineering institutes, top tech companies already present and keen interest in young Indian students in science and technology.
We have been witnessing a wave of fast adoption of smart connected products like Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled gadgets, smart lighting, smart homes and smart logistics etc. Indian tech companies in the space of the Internet of Things (IoT) are ramping up their business plans to take advantage of the support provided by the Indian government.
IOT has become a recent buzzword across the globe and soon it is supposed to outnumber the cellular communication devices across the world, and when this happens anything and everything is supposed to communicate to the user or enterprises through cloud.
Many Indian companies are working in the first phase of the deployment which is to deliver a monitoring capability over the network and once they have enough data, then predictive analysis can be made.
Few Indian IoT and data science companies are entering into IoT business to take care of the communication part of the overall ecosystem which includes every commercially available and viable technology whether it Low Energy Bluetooth (BLE) Wi-Fi, GSM, Narrowband IoT, LORA or SIGFOX etc.
The idea is to create and sustain a local homegrown ecosystem with local design, production and local consumption by offering customised applications and support to small and mid-tier customers.
The current situation demands it more than ever now as we have created larger dependencies on external sources for most of our electronics (design and manufacturing) needs. With this renewed emphasis on Make in India products, IoT can play a perfect pivot for Indian AI, Data Science, Machine Learning to drive the next Indian tech growth for IoT.