Inclusion And Innovation To Drive India’s Techade

New Delhi: Innovation, inclusive growth, and empowering tech talent will be the key enablers for technology to truly shape India’s Techade. Speaking at Microsoft ExpertSpeak, a curated dialogue series with industry experts, Debjani Ghosh, President, NASSCOM, Abhishek Singh, President and CEO, NeGD, and Dr Rohini Srivathsa, National Technology Officer, Microsoft India, called out the foundational role technology will play in giving India a competitive advantage on the global stage. The discussion focused on the opportunity India has to transform the lives of a billion-plus people with technology, driving economic, financial, healthcare, and educational inclusion for all.

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The speakers emphasised India’s opportunity to be a global innovation and tech talent hub, evident from the entrepreneurial momentum in the last few years. With technology as the backbone, startups, SMBs, and homegrown Indian companies are playing a key role in driving the next decade of growth and innovation for India. Digitally skilled talent will play a critical role in maintaining this growth trajectory for India, and the experts underscored the importance of grassroots skilling to empower every part of India to leverage the opportunities that technology creates as it shapes the country.

Excerpts From The Discussion

Technological Advances for Inclusive Growth

Abhishek Singh: "When we talk about inclusive growth, especially in designing anything for the digital platform, we need to consider if it will create a digital divide, if everybody will get equal access, or if it will create a realm of digital haves and digital have-nots. So, this consideration has been there right from the institutionalisation of common service centres to building services with a mobile-first approach, given that about 90% of Indians access services through their mobile phones, making services available in vernacular languages and designing them in a very simple, easy-to-use approach so that everybody can use it."

Debjani Ghosh: "As an industry, we have to ensure that we apply the lens of inclusion when we are designing and scaling our technology." Inclusion and innovation go hand in hand, and I strongly believe that no other country has been able to demonstrate that as impactfully as India has in the last two years.

Partnerships will be important. It has to be about the industry, startups, government, academia, and everyone coming together to make it happen. The design principles of the technology have to be human-centric innovation. It has to be security. It has to be inclusion, and it has to be scale, built into the start, built into the design of technology rather than an afterthought."

Rohini Srivathsa: "Access to information and opportunity is key for inclusion—whether it is jobs, knowledge, information, or education." The chatbot that we helped develop for MyGov was critical in giving people the information they needed, on time and in any language they wanted. And that's what we see happening with languages, in Indian languages across the board, even text to speech and speech to text capabilities. You don't have to be literate. You can speak to the device and be able to access information. Microsoft’s language translation now supports more than 12 languages. These are all abilities that provide access to information and opportunity for everyone. The second piece on inclusion, which is very close to my heart, is that of the disability divide. India has one of the largest segments of people who have various spectrums of disabilities. How do you use technology to build accessibility by design into products and services? How do you ensure that people with disabilities have the same access to information and opportunities that most of us take for granted? That will be critical for inclusion."

India As An Innovation Hub

Debjani Ghosh: "From an innovation in India standpoint, first we have a cost advantage. We can never underestimate the importance of cost advantage. It is always going to be important and, once in a while, we may not be the cheapest place, but we definitely have a strong cost advantage when you look at the overall ecosystem. Second, and very important, is the talent advantage. For us, the talent advantage is not just the 1.6 million digitally skilled pool of talent available, which is by far the largest in the world, but also STEM talent. The third is the power of a connected ecosystem in India. Very few countries have the best of both worlds, where they have a very strong innovative local ecosystem-not just startups, but also local IT companies and local product companies doing very well. And then you have the GCC or the multinationals who have some of their leading R & D work happening in India. So, we have the best of both worlds. And the fourth is ease of doing business. I think the government, beyond doubt, has proved that we are for technology, we are for industry, we are for reforms, and we will be ready to work with you."

Abhishek Singh: "When we look at driving innovation to solve problems that India has, in any sector, whether it’s agriculture, whether it’s healthcare, education, whether it’s Natural Language Processing, any solution that is deployed for India will naturally work for anywhere in the world." That is the advantage that we have and the scale that we have. The challenge remains: how do we ensure that we can nurture solutions, entrepreneurs, and startups that are building such solutions? One way in which we have been trying to do that at some level is to use hackathons and innovation challenges. How can we institutionally support them by offering challenges for startups and entrepreneurs to work on? The second step is to create a mechanism for procuring those services, primarily with the government, and the third step is to create an ecosystem to ensure the financing and funding of startups and entrepreneurs. We will be able to nurture innovation that will help us create multi-billion-dollar companies, not just unicorns, but companies that can dominate the tech space in the years to come, making this India’s Techade in the true sense".

Rohini Srivathsa: "If you can innovate for India, you can innovate for the world." India, in that sense, is an innovation laboratory. To try things that you would not even consider in many parts of the world. Cost-wise, ruggedness-wise, usability-wise, there are so many interesting challenges. We are working with a non-profit, Seeds, to use AI to predict cyclones and their intensity, and to be able to help people evacuate on time. Now, that's a solution that is applicable across the world. But in India, to be able to use AI, be able to use rooftops, and be able to predict where dense populations can do it, really creates a ruggedness that is very challenging and then an innovation for the world."

Tech Talent Drives Entrepreneurship

Debjani Ghosh: "We need to ensure that our education system is creating the mindset of an entrepreneur. While our education system has plus points when you look at the STEM talent that we create, we will need to move the focus a bit more, to creating character, to creating attitude. You know, the education system should be all about building that curiosity, learning to unlearn and continuing learning for your life rather than just learning a few skills. Curiosity is at the essence of it, and the willingness and the passion to continue to learn because you know that you die the day you stop learning. If our education system can create that mindset, India will become unstoppable in my mind."

Rohini Srivathsa: "We have been the hub for a lot of the global capability centres and our tech industry has been at the centre, but now we are becoming the startup capital of the world with the third largest startup ecosystem in the world." And more and more companies are looking at India to do innovation in deep tech. So, it's not just about talent in volume, but the quality of talent and the kind of deep tech talent that we are looking for, and to me, that is super, super exciting."

Abhishek Singh: "I foresee that in the next 3-5 years, we will have scenarios in which the youth may be able to acquire skills and courses from multiple institutions; for example, one can do a few courses from IIT, a few courses from Delhi University, and a few courses from Kolkata University. That will really expand opportunities and allow our youth to have greater choice. The delivery of these courses cannot be limited to only tier-1 and tier-2 cities; it must go to the rural areas. How can we create skill development centres in rural areas? Can common service centers transform into centres where they deliver such courses, and can skills be delivered in an online mode in almost every block of the country?"