Technology Impacting the People of India

Over the last two decades we have all witnessed the tremendous growth in globalization, increasing the interdependence and connectivity between geographies, global markets and businesses. Technology innovation has been a driving force behind globalization. The tremendous growth in information technology (IT) and continuous innovation are fueling socio-economic growth in India. According to the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM), the IT and BPO sectors are expected to create 2.5 lakh jobs in 2012.

The Mobile Revolution in India

The mobile users in India have grown tremendously in the last decade. Some of the latest figures from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) state that the mobile subscriber base increased to 881.4 million in October 2011. This number represents the large group of mobile users in urban and rural India. Mobiles have been a key leveler in the use of technology across all sections of our society, because of its affordability and potential for wider applications. Phone calls and text messages remain the key drivers for the high usage of mobile phones in urban and rural areas.

With the emergence of high-end smart phones one can now access their banking information, make payments, download music and carry out a host of other things on their mobiles. This is particularly popular among the Generation Y in cities, who need 'on-the-go' applications.

In rural areas, mobile phones are being used to try out a number of innovative services, including providing information about weather and prices of commodities to farmers and helping them with information on how to deal with crop problems. Technologies are also being developed to further expand the base of users that can be reached for these services. An example of such an innovation is the Spoken Web platform. It is attempting to create a voice based equivalent of the world-wide web, to provide information and services over an ordinary voice based channel. This technology provides an alternate technology platform for rural India, which is inundated with challenges such as low-literacy rates and no access to the Internet. IBM Research — India and the Karnataka Vocational Training and Skills Development Corporation (KVTSDC) launched a pilot in 2011, creating a smart employability platform that connects the entire ecosystem of job seekers, job providers, and training agencies particularly in the unorganized sector to reach out to each other using local languages.

The Government of India is also driving the use of mobile devices as a vital tool for financial inclusion and educational programs in rural areas. The low-cost Aakash tablet recently designed by IIT researchers, together with innovative applications and services, has the potential to have a revolutionary impact on bridging the digital-divide in India. The mobile industry in India will continue to grow, making low penetration of personal computers almost an irrelevant issue.

Building a Smarter Nation

We are entering an exciting era where technological advances are helping to make the world instrumented, interconnected and intelligent. By collecting data from inexpensive sensors through which you can measure the precise state of any natural or man-made system and by applying analytics over that data in real-time, one can make optimization decisions to make various systems run better. The inefficiencies in how the world operates today (e.g. in industries like transportation, energy and healthcare) have been estimated to be over US$ 15 Trillion annually. Applying information technology to eliminate or reduce those inefficiencies represents the next frontier and an exciting opportunity for societal impact. Solving these problems in the context of emerging nations like India often represents an even bigger challenge requiring significant innovation.

As an example, let us consider the imperative need to have a traffic information system to not only monitor and control traffic in cities, but to also disseminate the information to citizens to improve their quality of life. Cities across the world are using traffic sensing techniques such as loop detectors, computer vision technique, infra-red sensing etc. Smarter transportation systems deployed in cities like Stockholm and London use video cameras monitoring traffic lanes and computer vision techniques to charge toll automatically for vehicles entering congested parts of the city. These are expensive instrumentation techniques and are unlikely to work in Indian conditions. The traffic here is chaotic and unstructured; there is lack of lane discipline and a wide variety of vehicles on the road. To address these constraints, IBM Research-India is exploring the possibility of deploying low cost road acoustics based system that can estimate cumulative traffic density (free, medium and jammed conditions). This system uses information from noise on the roads (engine noise, honking, air turbulence and tire noise) to characterize the traffic density. Technologies like these are an illustration of innovative IT driven solutions impacting everyday life of citizens in India.

IT has also transformed the paradigms of doing business. Every big and small organization in India, across sectors such as financial services, banks, healthcare, travel and transport etc. are making significant investments in technology. The rise of the Internet has changed the manner in which we carry out everyday transactions such as communications, banking, shopping, investments, entertainment, travel and so on. The Government of India has also been a keen adopter of IT, focusing on projects to improve the livelihood in rural India and better execution of its administrative functions.

Considering the extensive impact of information technology, it will continue to drive growth in India with new innovations in areas such as cloud services, virtualization and big data.