Being the torchbearer of Indian IT, Karnataka’s contribution will be extremely crucial for the country to reach its ambitious mandate of becoming a $1-trillion digital economy by 2025, according to industry leaders.
The State government said it had a commitment to grow its technology business to $150 billion in the next five years from the current $50 billion.
However, large technology firms, start-ups, R&D outfits, accelerators, incubators and educators participating at the State’s annual IT show, Bengaluru Tech Summit, here on Monday, unanimously said the technology sector in the State required a revamp for it to get back to quick growth and contribute meaningfully to the country’s $1-trillion digital journey.
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Participating in a session on Bengaluru’s Role in Achieving $1-trillion Digital Economy, Nivruti Rai, country head, Intel India, said, at present, the focus areas for R&D in India were electrical engineering, chemistry, mechanical engineering and healthcare.
However, in the patent front, the country has to do a lot more. Giving out data, she said, in 2008, India had filed 750 global patents, when China had 6,000, and the U.S. had 53,000 patents. In the next 10 years, that’s in 2018, the U.S. had only 56,000 patents, but China had 60,000 patents and India just 2,100 patents. That means, for every 6,000 people, the U.S. has a patent, for every 25,000 people, China files a patent and in India one patent is filed for a population of 6,00,000 people.
“This is no sad story, but it is a huge, 600 times bigger opportunity out here for India, its entrepreneurs, start-ups, innovators and R&D outfits,’’ insisted Ms. Rai.
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Taking a look at the unicorn ecosystem, Ms. Rai added that most unicorns in the U.S. happened in the areas of Cloud, AI and Life Sciences. In China, they came from e-tailing, electric cars and healthcare and in India, in they came from e-tailing and payment platforms, but they also need to happen in products and in healthcare, where there is a huge opportunity.
Speaking on the occasion, Biocon CMD Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw said: “To achieve something big, one need to be a risk-taker and a change-maker. We need to have a clear strategy and roadmap to make it happen. We also need to have regulations and policies to build an economy around data.’’
Internet of Things and robotising are the other two key areas where innovation and R&D should have focus.
ABB India MD Sanjeev Sharma said use of IoT and robotisation had already been helping companies globally to enhance productivity and resulting in a direct saving of $120 billion, and an additional saving of 20 billion.
ABB, for instance, is currently using 8,000 robots from Bengaluru to manage diverse projects all over the globe, including 125 cement plants in Europe.
“Through robotics, we have achieved a 30% productivity enhancement at our Nelamangala plant here. Safety-related incidents have dramatically reduced as human intervention could be minimised in risky tasks,” he said.
According to Mohandas Pai, human capital is the key catalyst and there is a greater need for the country to improve the quality of education and human resources.
“India’s tech sector is set to touch $200 billion in 2020, of which software exports will be $125 bn. Also, by 2025, the country will have 1,00,000 start-ups and 100 unicorns and Karnataka and Bengaluru are going to lead the second wave of growth as well,” Mr. Pai said.