India's Techade: Upskilling will be key, say industry leaders

In his Independence Day speech, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared that this was India’s “Techade” and that the country was on the cusp of a digital revolution. (In 2015, the government had launched the Digital India programme, covering multiple projects of central ministries and states, to expand the country’s digital economy.)

The tech industry has applauded the government’s intent, but many stakeholders say that achieving this goal requires investments in upskilling, even as connectivity and infrastructure in rural areas remain a hurdle.

Says Sindhu Gangadharan, senior vice-president and managing director, SAP Labs India: “The new vision for digital India will require a focus on building a digitally-fluent, future-ready workforce through sustained upskilling/reskilling.” The next 25 years, she says, will be defined by the digital preparedness to make a large-scale impact across geographies. “At the centre of this evolution will be inclusion, sustainability, and people-centric innovation.” 

SAP Labs India recently opened the SAP Centre for Digital Government in partnership with the ministry of electronics and information technology’s National e-Governance Division.

Gangadharan adds that India’s Techade will be defined by homegrown and global entities that develop intellectual property in areas such as artificial intelligence (AI), automation, the Cloud, Internet of Things, and 5G to drive business growth and data-driven decision-making.

“The R&D workforce of India is the backbone of SAP. All of our innovation at scale comes from here. We are all set to double our current India workforce by Q4, 2025, with a new campus in Devanahalli, Bengaluru,” she says.

Industry leaders believe the need for upskilling becomes even more vital with the rise of web 3.0, which is boosting the demand for new creative skills. 

India, the world’s metaverse engine 

“We see India as the metaverse engine of the world — with the talent, innovation, and capability required to deliver on our clients’ bold ambitions. Skilled professionals are needed in areas such as AI, blockchain, security, and 3D-world creators who can bring together different elements of the metaverse for real-world applications,” says Mahesh Zurale, senior managing director at Accenture, who leads the company’s advanced technology centres in India.

In 2020, industry body Nasscom released a research paper titled Techade — The New Decade Strategic Review, which highlighted the need to integrate rapidly evolving technologies with people’s lives to bring in change. 

“The Techade will be defined by our collective ability to move from ‘technology potential’ to ‘technology impact’” and will be built on human-centric innovation for impact, Nasscom said.

Experts say that the country’s digital inclusiveness will come from synergies between state governments, regulators, nodal ministries, private entities and non-profits. Though the outlook is positive, technology has yet to spread from urban to rural areas, they argue.

Vikram Gupta, senior vice-president, research, at Market Xcel, a market research firm, reckons the focus on deploying technology in health care, education, and agro-economy may lead growth in coming years.

“Bullish data on penetration of technology — 1.2 billion people with their unique digital identity, 560 million internet subscriptions, 8.3 GB average data consumption per subscriber — all point to India’s accelerated approach to achieving the dream that has been defined,” he says.

Though industry sentiment about digital penetration is positive, connectivity and infrastructure still lag in the villages, Gupta adds. Initiatives like the Common Service Centres (CSCs) under Digital India, he concedes, have helped rural people understand the internet’s benefits, such as online banking.

He adds, “We can see wide adoption of technology by consumers, through our research. Some popular consumer brands are looking to expand in rural areas, indicating that there is a lot more growth potential.”

As per government data, 531,203 CSCs were operational across India’s states and Union Territories as of June 2022, of which 420,198 were at the Gram Panchayat level.

Mihir Gandhi, Partner at PwC India, who leads the firm’s payments transformation practice, says that the Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile trinity has helped take the Digital India initiative to the grassroots, though parts of the north and north-east are under-penetrated, compared with the western and southern states.

Promotional efforts are needed, he says, including awareness building, skilling, provision of the payment transactions infrastructure, and incentives to set up that infrastructure.

In his Independence Day speech, the prime minister had said that the growth of startups in the country was led by talent from tier-II and tier-III cities. Gandhi says concerted efforts by state governments would help the startup ecosystem, now centred in tech hubs like Bengaluru, to spread to smaller cities.