Bhopal 2020—A young production executive working in a factory steals a glance at his wearable device and is prompted that it’s time to do his last round of the shop floor and head home. He looks at the console in front of him and is assured by the green lights everywhere showing that the self-managed robotic facility is operating smoothly. As he prepares to leave his workplace, he sets off an indicator that signals to his driver-less car to turn the air conditioning on and also to do a remote warning to the home computer that he could be home in twenty minutes.
The digital refrigerator at home senses a shortage of milk and signals the car to take a route that passes by a convenience store. The ‘click and collect’ facility is automatically initiated to place an order for milk which is waiting as the car makes a quick stop on the way home.
The digital citizen of the future may be a story that has been told before, but it always conjured up visions of San Jose, Stockholm, Seoul or Singapore. Today, it is very plausible that this story is indeed set in the smart city of Bhopal, transformed by the sweeping changes of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Digital India movement. Look at the scenarios that will play out. The National Broadband Mission and the National Optical Fibre Network would cover every mile of the country with high speed voice and data connectivity with formerly placid players like the NIC, RailTel and BSNL rising to the occasion and providing the digital infrastructure completely by 2017.
State data centres would host comprehensive infrastructure, platforms and software applications as a service to enable manufacturing supply chains to be fully integrated across large medium and small factories and information technology services would be available on tap on a pay-per-use basis to every business establishment. Healthcare facilities would be transformed through tele-medicine and remote diagnostic facilities available in everyone of 250,000 Panchayats and 600,000 villages across the country. All educational facilities would be connected with access to high quality education content and blended learning a large bias towards pre-requisite, reinforcement and remedial learning through technology would be the order of the day.
This dream of digital India is being created in the minds of every citizen and also on the drawing boards of all policy planners with the announcement of smart cities, focus on indigenous electronics manufacturing, the NatHealth Healthcare movement and DISHA (Digital Shaksharta Abhiyaan), the National Digital Literacy Mission, which aims to make one member of every one of 200 million plus households in the country digitally literate. With the “myGov” portal taking off in a big way as the window of the Indian citizen to the workings of our government and a tech savvy Prime Minister, a large wave of digitisation of all government records and digitalisation of every citizen-government process will be unleashed in the country. The IT minister has already indicated that the smart mobile phone will be the device for all access to information and e-transactions with the government and the aggressive electronics manufacturing initiative will put these phones into the hands of the common man.
Digital India is just one of a slew of initiatives crafted by the government led by Prime Minister Modi which includes the Adarsh Gram and the Swacch Bharat Abhiyaan. The fact that this was going to be a highly communicative and digitally savvy administration was evident during the campaign itself, which is now the subject of many business school case studies who are intrigued by the similarities between the Obama campaigns and the Modi electoral success story.
The use of cloud, social media, Big Data and mobility are now boardroom discussions and while incidents like the Uber cab driver fiasco have raised warning signals about excessive use of technology for day to day processes, the rapid rise of digital commerce and the proliferation of data, analytics and mobility are throwing up more challenges and opportunities every day. A government which has taken the digital bull by the horns and put the agenda out there for all of us to dissect, analyse and then participate in deserves all the credit for both the quality of its vision and the robust initial actions it has taken. If the “acche din” doesn’t happen now, we will have only ourselves to blame!
Ganesh Natarajan
CEO, Zensar Technologies
