Sridhar Vembu writes: A fully digital India is key to a fully developed India with $25 trillion GDP

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Sridhar Vembu

When the pandemic started in early 2020, I was in a village in Tenkasi in Tamil Nadu, from where I had been working for six months. Without missing a beat, I could continue talking to clients and colleagues, coding, and running my business from the rural heartland.

After the lockdown was lifted, we started opening offices across villages and Tier 2/3 cities where our employees had moved to be closer to their families. All this was made possible thanks to the availability of high-speed Internet that makes all our work possible.

‘Availability of high speed Internet as a core utility for delivery of services to citizens’ is a key aspect of digital infrastructure, and one of the key visions of Digital India. For this, the BharatNet project was instituted, and has already connected over 100,000 villages. BharatNet, the opening of the 5G network, the availability of data at low cost, and smartphone penetration have all helped in making digital services accessible across India. We are also witnessing more and more companies rethinking hiring, and moving their offices to smaller cities, if not villages.

In the seven years since Digital India was launched, India has been a home to many technological advancements. UPI has been successful, and schemes such as Digidhan Abhiyaan, E-Granthalaya, E-Panchayat, E-Hospital, and E-Pathshala, to make technology accessible and inclusive, have seen good adoption. Make in India and Startup India, which were helped by projects under Digital India, have led to an increase in entrepreneurship. India has now become home to nearly 66,000 startups — the third-largest startup ecosystem in the world.

The launch of Aatmanirbhar Bharat, which further encouraged development of technologies, particularly the ones that we use, has further created a conducive environment for development of deep-tech capabilities that serve the domestic market. Our next stage of development will be accelerated by our growing deep-tech capabilities.

The Indian startup ecosystem is maturing rapidly. Challenging economic conditions in the West pose a near-term challenge, as venture capital funds pull back worldwide, but that will also serve to make us more resilient and more competitive in the long term, by inculcating a mindset of doing more with less.

It is clear that the way forward for India, and indeed for the world, is to balance supply and demand more locally — and for that to happen, we need to be able to develop the know-how, especially for areas such as healthcare, semiconductors, etc. It will take us a decade or more for making significant advancements, but it will help create the right ecosystem that will foster innovation.

Rural talent, which often doesn’t find opportunity, will be pivotal to building these domestic capabilities. It will be up to entrepreneurs to take advantage of the digital infrastructure, tap the talent in rural areas, and invest in up-skilling. As our experience has shown, this helps in creating resilience within the business.

India has a large and growing population, which makes it inevitable for us to not just Make in India but also Design in India. A single-minded focus on developing R&D capabilities, especially deep-tech expertise across vital strategic industries, and the initiatives under Digital India will help lay the foundation.

Sridhar Vembu is CEO and Co-founder, Zoho Corp. Views are personal, and do not represent the stand of this publication.