By Lt. General P.C. Katoch (Retd) Former Director General of Information Systems, Indian Army

Narendra Modi addressing at the launching ceremony of Digital India Week, in New Delhi

To say that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was a big success would be an understatement especially in context of the response he received for Digital India. As per a 2014 survey, 15 percent startups in Silicon Valley were founded by Indians; Indians founded more startups (from seven percent in 1999 to 15.5 percent in 2012) than Britain, China and Taiwan combined even though Indians make up just six percent of Silicon Valley’s working population. With Satya Nadella and Sundat Pichai heading Microsoft and Google respectively, Indians are ensconced at the very top rung as most influential global business leaders, other prominent Indians being Rashmi Sinha (SlideShare), Vinod Khosla (Sun Microsystems), Amit Singhal (Google), Shantanu Narayen (Adobe), Padamsree Warrior (Cisco Systems), Sanjay Mehrotra (SanDisc) and the like. India added some 150 million smartphone internet connections last year and Digital India aims at the impetus to put India ‘on-line’ by 2019.

That was the precise reason for the red carpet rolled out to Modi by Google, Microsoft, Apple, Tesla and the like since business opportunities in India are undoubtedly stupendous. There have been write-ups that India must first provide basic amenities first and growth must be all round, which is correct. After all, we cannot avoid sectors like health and become a country of epidemics as warned by Lancet, Britain’s medical journal. There also been talk of the number of internet connections required for Digital India to succeed. For example, in Karnataka about 14 percent population has access to a computer or laptop with only 10 percent population using internet. But this would change with the smartphone revolution that took China by storm years back and is currently the craze in India. Of course, coming to the level of China where internet aided by e-commerce is helping transform the backward agricultural sector into lucrative modern industry will take time but this too can be initiated in affluent states like Punjab. 30 percent of rural population in China is already online. Earlier despite good harvests, inefficient sales, shrinking labour and lack of access to loans had squeezed farmer earnings and lowered the rural economy. However, farming has boomed China past three decades.

The summer grain output reached a record high of 141.07 million tons in 2015 after 11 consecutive years of rise.Taobao.com, China's largest online shopping platform, has launched an agricultural channel while Alibaba plans to invest US$ 1 billion into 100,000 new service centres in Chinese villages in the next three to five years to help train farmers in internet use. In September 2015, China unveiled an "Internet Plus" action plan targeting integration of the internet with traditional sectors to make them smarter and more efficient. But there are more pressing apprehensions that need to be addressed.

• First, with major foreign players coming on board and the speed at which India is planned to come on-line, is cyber security being addressed adequately? Is there adequate focus with a timed road map to guard against tampering of our data at the Centre and States level, which if no addressed can create chaos in a democracy like ours?
• Second, who will these big global players tie up, which Indian companies and what happens to the numerous startup and small indigenous companies that are building artificial intelligence, computing, sensors, robotics, drones, data analysis, advertising technologies and medicine but are not taken seriously even by Indian biggies like Wipro and Infosys? Are these startups and small companies to shut shop or left to the mercy of DRDO and DPSU’s?
• Third, if we do not have a comprehensive plan to integrate the indigenous startups and small firms into Digital India then this will be a setback to our R&D and will likely result in more unemployment and migrations abroad. Isn’t it strange that Wipro is establishing a technology centre in California to partner with startups in artificial intelligence and automation while Infosys is investing in Vertex Ventures at Palo Alto for access to startups focused on disruptive technologies? Is the government aware of the many indigenous startups in artificial intelligence, automation and disruptive technologies and how about giving directions giants like Wipro and Infosys to first look at integration at home before looking abroad? Should such measures not be part of governance aimed at taking India forward?
• Fourth, is Digital India making us lose focus elsewhere? Chinese internet company Tencent (qq.com) with offices in Delhi and Mumbai offers equivalents of Skype, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Microchat, Wizard, Google, Gaming etc and claims improvement over Twitter. They also have V-chat, equivalent of Whatsapp, being used in 200 countries. Their gaming application earns 50 percent of overall money. When does the government plan to have such indigenous capability? When will we have our own operating systems and indigenous chips? Till when will a company like Reliance continue to use a Chinese internet dongle? All these are issues that the government needs to address.