Digital Culture – The New Paradigm Shift

India of today has inherited a resplendent culture that a sagacious legacy has left behind. The legacy that expounded the importance of family values, harvesting of knowledge, cultivation of tradition, investment in different forms of learning, thus enabling a perfect amalgamation of technologically driven societal changes and preservation of rich Indian values.

The abundant natural resources, population with greater and ever increasing appetite for acquiring new knowledge, ability of the current and upcoming generations to master contemporaneous skills, ardent participation in research, precision in engineering, best practices in medicine are the explicit strengths withwhich the nation would like the world to recognize modern India for. The India of 21^st century is indeed a bustling hub of multiple adjectives that has re-established the country as a major force on the global map. The so-called developed nations are no longer visualizing India as the land of snake charmers and elephants as being the safest mode for movements of goods and people. The technocrats, educators and professionals from all fields of specialization have worked very hard over the years to build a new image for India.

India’s majority i.e.67.27 percent of its population falls within the age group of 15-64, making it one of the world’s largest prosumer (Producer – Consumer) groups.The government’s favoring policy of encouraging the Private-Public Partnership specially in the area of healthcare, medical tourism and education is further attracting attention of the major business groups of the world.

The expertise in Information Technology has enabled global business to set up their back-office operations in India. The agro-based industries are making magnifying contributions to India’s aim of being a five trillion-dollar economy in near future. This makes India as a tenable country to do business with. The philosophy of strengthening 3Ps across the breadth and width of enterprises has helped businesses turned into digital firms.

The business enterprises systematically adopted the changing technology and crafted the growth story through Automation  ⇒ Digitization  ⇒ Digitalization over the years.

Digital Transformation aimed at creating or converting processes and activities has boosted the economy, and has helped create and evolve models so that the entire community in near future becomes a fully networked digital society. Many enterprises have redefined their strategy to include digitalization as a part of their core process to leverage IT enabled decision making, to optimize productivity and enhance their digital presence.

The great leap however suffered a major impedance with the COVID pandemic sickening the globe. The sight of factories stopping production abruptly, railways, roadways and airways coming to a grinding halt, the exodus of labour forces from cities to their native lands often on foot, became common news for the media. However, IT enabled organization were able to survive while those slow in realizing the potential of IT have either perished or are struggling to survive.

Image Source: Envato Elements

Undoubtedly COVID 19 negatively impacted humanity, however India’s technology backed resilienceacted as its saviour. The impending lockdown confined millions of professionals to their houses and many of them returned home to their villages. In spite of all the odds, the current growth and an improved internet penetration helped tech companies to reorganize themselves and made work from home possible. The home office achieved dual objective of enabling lockdown and at the same time contributed to theeconomy by providing unmatched and uninterrupted deliverables.

Looking inward, one of the greatest learning from COVID pandemic and the reinforced thought processis that, since most of India still continues to live in rural areas, mere e-connecting them through mobile phones will not be enough. To reap the real benefits, the urban-rural divide that technology has created over the years needs to be bridged. The city needs to move to villages, the technology inclusion has to be re-strategized in order to ensure that all the villages get the amenities that will make life out there comfortable and at the same time aim at reducing the influx into cities which are already overwhelmed.

Creation and capturing of digital information is increasing many fold, policies and schemes of the government are being redesigned and customized as per the needs of the population, the messages in the form of text, videos and photos can now be seamlessly transferred over mobile phones, applications that are scalable are being designed and all these are now possible due to effective technology platforms with minimum maintenance cost.

Image Source: Envato Elements

It’s time India starts rewriting its growth story with technology inclusion as its central theme in order to ensure that all the schemes reach far and wide and in the language local to the masses. This will disrupt the movement of labour forces from villages to cities and at the same time will enable the innovations generated in the labs and research institutes of the city reach and transform the villages.

The real digital transformation should help build the smart environments making the user interaction implicit. The adaptive interfaces should help discover the services and enable information retrieval with utmost precision. The focus area for the technology driven growth story should be healthcare, quality education and seamless access to financial aids and insurance claims. This in real sense would mean engaging and empowering every citizen of this country to contribute to the economic growth.

The country farsightedly recognized that sustenance, maintenance, and redevelopment of nation can be achieved by exploring the benefits accrued through Information Technology and the internet. As a result, the sign of progress can be felt once again, as the COVID pandemic eases out, across every state, city and town in the country. The roads have started reaching remotest of the places, electricity and illumination is reaching far and wide. Railways are adding new rakes, bridges are being constructed, new airports are being developed. Self-driven cars, automated machines and transportations, smart building and smart cities reflecting the modernity and progress in the society have started looking real.

Reaching last miles through technology inclusion and adoption willfurther help weave the much needed social fabrics into one single group – the netizens.

It’s ADVANTAGE INDIA all the way!!!

Dr. Devendranath G Jha

The author is a Professor and Area Chairperson – Data Science & Technology at K J Somaiya Institute of Management.

Disclaimer: This content is distributed by K J Somaiya Institute of Management. No TNIE Group journalist is involved in the creation of this content.