The ‘Make in India’ programme has given a push to some local manufacturing, but it is merely an assembly job with imported technology and components. The result is a low value-addition. As we aim to become a developed nation, we need to carry out design and development in India, use as many local components as possible, make machinery for production and own a significant part of IPR (intellectual property right) for the products. We need to strive to be amongst the technology leaders in at least a few areas. How do we go about doing it? We need to first understand India’s strengths:

We now have an increasing number of young scientists and engineers with high-quality expertise,
having obtained the best training available. They are raring to go and to lead, if the nation can provide
the right push and support.

We have a large pool of fresh engineering graduates, and they can be good even if they come from lesser known colleges. They must be motivated to work hard for long hours, learn from each other, and take up impossible challenges. Fortunately, the cost of such talent in India is much lower than elsewhere.

We have a very large market, but only for affordable products. This makes the task of developing such products a challenge, but overcoming it would push us towards a leadership position in technology.

Given these strengths, what do we do? We need to, of course, invest in R&D and design products. But when we invest say $100 million in AI, countries like the US would invest several hundred billion dollars. Trying to compete head-on with the West in areas with very large capital investments is not going to get us far. Instead, we need to focus on some big problems that our society faces and for which we have no solution at present. If we think out of the box and bring together technology expertise from multiple domains, we will create momentum in the right direction. We would have to work extremely hard, be ready to fail, fall and get up again to be able to make progress. As we solve such impossible problems, we will emerge as technology leaders in multiple areas. Let me illustrate this with two examples.

Game-changing systems: Today, in a city like Chennai, it takes over an hour to travel about 15 km between home and office. Wasting over two hours on a daily commute cannot be our future. It is likely to get worse with increasing urban migration and vehicle ownership. Suppose we design a transport system that could make this journey possible in 20 minutes, even in peak time, while addressing some additional issues—be the most energy-efficient transport system (ruling out ideas like flying), and use only green electricity; scale for tomorrow’s peak traffic and provide a very comfortable ride (say with air-conditioning); be deployable in existing cities with all their constraints; and have a total cost (including depreciation, interest and operating expenditure) less than that of travelling by a two- wheeler today. To conceive, build and operationalise such systems would be game-changing, not just for India, but also for similarly crowded cities elsewhere. This will require multiple technologies and
push us to be a world leader.

Virtual experts: Let us take another Indian problem. About 70 per cent of Indian households have monthly incomes less than `15,000. When a woman from such a household wants to start a nano- enterprise and needs a mere Rs 1 lakh loan, the first choice is invariably to go to informal sources, where annual interest rates can be as high as 36-60 per cent. Over the last 15 years, microfinance and NBFCs have emerged to provide such loans at about 25 per cent interest rates; their cost of funds, cost of risks, and cost of operations are such that bringing the rates much lower is a serious challenge. There are experts who could visit the woman at her home, talk with her for about 10
minutes, and pose the next question listening carefully to each answer, so as to assess the risk associated with the desired loan accurately. The problem is that such experts do not scale and sending an inexperienced person to do the job increases the risks considerably.

It is here that new technologies can solve the problem non-linearly. Fortunately, mobile phones and WhatsApp video calls have reached even such low-income homes. Suppose we leverage technologies like AI, video and speech processing to send a pleasant-sounding Virtual Expert, who speaks in the local language and dialect with the woman. It would examine the words, expressions and tone of each response and at the same time search for any information about the woman and her financial transactions to pose the next question. One would not only be able to determine risks associated with the business and the loan but could also use similar calls to carry out collections. The costs associated would thus go down considerably, and loans at 15 per cent interest rates would become viable. There is no reason why India cannot build such a technology, use it widely to perfect it and take it to the world.

There are indeed many such large avenues to become the technology leader in the world. We can get there only if we think afresh and have a strong will.

The author is an Institute Professor, IIT Madras

Read the full article at: https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/cover-story/story/20240826-technology-ashok-jhunjhunwala-strive-to-be-technology-leaders-2583266-2024-08-18