Fourth Industrial Revolution has been emerging in recent times and its impact on India has to be explored.
What is Fourth Industrial revolution?
It is characterized by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres.
It brings together digital technology and the physical world to create a new range of products and services.
The possibilities of billions of people connected by mobile devices, with unprecedented processing power, storage capacity, and access to knowledge, are unlimited.
And these possibilities will be multiplied by emerging technology breakthroughs in fields such as artificial intelligence, robotics, the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage, and quantum computing.
The revolution is evolving at an exponential rather than a linear pace and it is disrupting almost every industry in every country.
What is the case with India?
India is not a frontrunner in most of these areas.
But India started beginning to make their contribution to the emerging digital-physical world.
India heads the list of the Top 10 digital nations, according to the recently released Tholons Services Globalisation Index.
The rank reflects the country taking global leadership in the use of mobile data, Aadhaar’s success in giving every resident a unique digital identity, and Rupay’s rapid growth and acceptance when compared to the stodgy performance of global card companies like Visa and MasterCard.
The features of these platforms are low cost and massive scale, precisely the combination that defines most Indian markets.
Such platforms can be used to offer products and cloud-based services to citizens and consumers by governments and businesses.
The overwhelming majority of the 10 million businesses registered with the GST (goods and services tax) system don’t have access to institutional credit.
The new technologies, data platforms like the GST Network and the Corporate Identification Number system, along with interventions like the Reserve Bank’s support for a Public Credit Registry, make it possible to radically improve the transparency of the financial system.
This ensures small businesses without either a credit history or assets to offer as collateral can get credit on the basis of their cash flow.
The result could be transformative for millions of small businesses.
If cloud-based platforms can be put in the public space, new businesses could build on them, as Uber has done with the Global Positioning System (GPS).
The remarkable volunteer-driven Bengaluru firm iSpirt is working on a platform for medical application.
Businesses that build on such platforms that offer low cost and large scale could facilitate success in 4thIR in a way that India failed to achieve in earlier manufacturing avatars.
Digital-only banking is already a reality, while the cloud-based Zoho business software package offers small businesses affordable pay-as-you-go business software solutions that are precluded by the heavy upfront costs.
What should be done?
Countries like China kept Google at bay while developing its own Baidu search engine, and also kept out the international credit cards while pushing its own UnionPay.
This could be due to the concern that lack of control of key data platforms could become a national vulnerability in conflict situations.
This was also the reason for the major push towards data localisation as policy measure in India, despite US opposition.
The development of the satellite-guided Navic system as an alternative to the US-promoted GPS is another result of such thinking.
However, India should ensure that access to the domestic market be leveraged also in other areas like transportation, manufacturing etc., without losing efficiency.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution may indeed have the potential to robotize humanity and thus to deprive us of our heart and soul.
But the creativity, empathy, stewardship inherent in them can also lift humanity into a new collective and moral consciousness based on a shared sense of destiny.
It is incumbent on the people and the government to make sure the latter prevails.
