India Part of Group Shaping Future of Tech

India will be among nations that shape the future of products, devices and technologies, said minister of state for electronics and information technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar.

“It is certainly clear to the world at large and to us that the future of technology may not be led by India or any one country. But certainly, India will be amongst the pack of nations that will shape the future of technology, shape the future of products, devices and platforms,” Chandrasekhar said at the Economic Times Global Business Summit.

In the post-Covid era, the role of technology and India’s contribution will be more important than ever, he said, adding that investments in Digital India and the India Stack had played a crucial role in managing Covid-19 vaccinations.

The government is finalising the new digital personal data protection bill and national data governance framework policy, which will pave the way for the “internet-plus economy” framework, he said.

Among the newer technologies, artificial intelligence will be a “kinetic enabler” of the digital economy, he said.

“I think what ChatGPT has recently shown, and how ChatGPT can take a long-lost, discarded search engine like Bing and suddenly make it competitive and relevant with the dominant force of the Google search engine, tells you the power of AI,” the minister said.

India will also introduce accountability and scrutiny for companies using artificial intelligence in the structure of the new Digital India Act, apart from checking overreach of the technology, he said. “There is the whole issue of harm and ethical misuse of AI. So those are all these boundaries that we want to build, without really coming in the way of innovation, but certainly not allowing innovation to be a reason to escape scrutiny and accountability,” Chandrasekhar said.

The government will also soon launch an India Open Compute initiative, which will focus on devices and products for automobiles, the standards for automobile mobility and computers. The initiative will also enable startups to work in these areas and target launching services and products in high-performance computing such as quantum computing, blockchain and others, he said.

Fast-growing Fintech

These initiatives will follow the United Payments Interface (UPI) model under which the government will build an enabling framework and leave it open for private companies, academic institutions and researchers to forge partnerships and build solutions on top of the government stack, Chandrasekhar said.

“UPI was built to solve a government problem of transmitting subsidies to a beneficiary without leakages and without any intermediation, accurately and responsibly,” he said. “That application has been solved by UPI and it has spawned one of the fastest-growing fintech ecosystems in the world. That model will continue to be played out as the India Stack expands and becomes more and more intelligent.”

Solutions built on top of the India Stack model will be further accelerated, with applications expanding to other areas and ecosystems. These, in turn, will spawn all kinds of other startups and ecosystems such as the Open Network for Digital Commerce, the minister said.

‘Free & Fair’

“We could all agree that in no space do we want domination by a few companies,” he said. “There are many segments of the digital economy that are uncomfortably dominated by one, two or three big companies.”

The government, without discouraging any business from coming to India, would not want the digital economy to be “throttled or controlled,” Chandrasekhar said.

“Our policy goals are openness and being open is the first boundary condition. Openness means what? It means free, fair and unfettered choice for digital nagriks,” he said.

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