How India Can Lead the New-Age Tech Revolution
It is no secret that India has historically missed the key stages of industrial and tech revolution due to centuries of colonisation and decades of poverty even after independence. However, the 21st Century is being called ‘Asia’s Century,’ as its countries are expected to grow at a rapid pace over the next couple of decades, India remains one of its leading contenders. The world is keeping an eye on its growth story today and has begun investing heavily on our various economic sectors. However, some still doubt India’s potential in paving the path for tech inventions due to certain major shortcomings it faces even today. Despite all the odds, there are many ways in which India can lead the new-age tech revolution in the near future.
India as the leader of new-age tech revolution
As I mentioned earlier, India has missed many important cycles of industrial and tech revolution that could have laid the foundations of its tech research. Even after independence, India was so deeply immersed in poverty due to unaccounted loot by British colonisers made it virtually impossible for us to make any tangible investments in technology. But now that we have become economically strong enough to invest heavily in infrastructure and technology, the tables have turned. In addition to this, India has historically produced many sharp and talented minds in the field of science and technology.
We often talk about how the CEOs of many tech conglomerates in the world are Indians, which includes names like Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella. At the end of the day, they received education and training in India. Imagine the potential of Indian minds when they can lead the top tech organisations in the world not by graduating from American universities like Harvard, but from Indian education institutions which have not yet modernised.
India is investing heavily on 5G technology to become among the first nations in the world to produce world-class telecom services. Among the many important developments that came from Prime Minister Modi’s recent state visit to the United States was the transfer of jet engine technology. This will kickstart India’s ability to produce its own line of fighter jets and defence equipment. Similar progress is taking place in the space sector. ISRO is currently preparing to launch Chandrayaan-3 in the next few weeks, with an objective to explore different areas of the moon that will explore the areas that hasn’t been explored by NASA, or any other space organisation in the world. The scale of India’s rise in the field of technology is thus taking place like never before.
Biggest obstacles for India as the leader of new-age tech revolution
While it’s true that India’s poverty restricted us from pursuing technical development, we can only blame our past so much. The truth is that from our own end as well, we had shown absolute reluctance in investing money on education, research and technology even after we became a stronger economy after the 1991 economic liberalisation. Our tendency to completely depend on the West and Russia for technology and defence while making no research of our own only delayed the timeline of our new-age tech revolution.
I had earlier mentioned Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella, who are today the most influential tech personalities. But the obvious bitter reality behind these names are that they had to leave India for better employment opportunities as there was basically no scope for tech professionals in India two decades ago. The crux of the matter is that we have never recognised and rewarded our scientists and tech experts. To add to it, it took India a long time to ease the process of business creation, which includes tech companies. We still have a long way to go to overcome this problem.
Pushing for a wider scale of research is the need of the hour. The more we invest in research today, the better results we will yield in a decade from now. While the transfer of technology will make a huge difference as well, we have to empower our scientists to make their own research so that India can create pure indigenous technology.
