Who are the visionaries and leaders?
Who can guide the country towards a more equal and equitable digital world?
The benefits of the IT revolution and this need a better and sustained articulation so that the common man would understand and benefit by such a revolutionary era in which we are living and passing through.
All we know now is what the IT czars say about the potentials and we, the common people just stand and gap at the astronomical salaries drawn by the youngster and also the seniors. The millionaires and the billionaires. What are the larger economic and social benefits, for the largest majority of the people? The rising users of mobile phones and other beneficiaries like direct payment beneficiaries?
We need more popularisers, journalists and platform orators and others. Also exponents of the many future scenarios.IT must go beyond big salaries and also the consequent rising inequalities and inequities.
We have to cross the man y thresholds and reach a more equitable social order. Now, IT industry is facing some headwinds, as they say! There is a slowdown in the otherwise fastest growing Indian industry sector. Information Technology sector is facing a certain slowdown. Almost all the big IT players, Inforsys, Wipro and some others have reported declined revenues this June quarters.
So many reasons, dollar-denominated earning only forms 60 per cent or less earnings. There are problems aplenty for the IT companies, the spenders. New orders from the SMAC sectors, social, mobile, analytics and cloud) need new skills and not man y Indian IT companies are well placed to take them up. The US market is also not yet out of the woods, though there are signals for the contrary. The gloom in the US business environment is yet to subside and thus, the Indian IT companies are facing dilemmas as to next steps.
The spread of Internet, the coming of the mobile revolution have also impacted much on the larger society.
One area where the mobile revolution has impacted is the agri sector and also the other social sectors. Many new services are now delivered by the government. Digital payments are one such area where a new revolution is taking place. The rise in smart phones and the government push to direct payments of the man y government subsidies and payments would only further fuel the digital revolution.
Digital payments are expected to further grow by ten times in the next few years, four years 500 billion dollars or 15% of the GDP!
By 2020, the country’s internet users will reach 500 million users and half of them will become digital consumers by then and they would go for various services through the digital platform.
Our education and training sectors have to understand the emerging digital Revolution and come out with suitable polices to develop skills in-house. We need leaders and visionaries, not just entrepreneurs who ride on the global waves of technology revolutions and impost such techs from foreign sources. Getting foreign order, going out to work off shores and just concentrating on revenue targets is not enough.
How to turn our off-line consumers into online consumers, digital consumers, and spread their population widely across the country can impact the agriculture sector for the larger good of the country, for both the producers and the consumer classes.
If the mobile revolution would only impact more and more the rural population, the IT revolution would end up as the harbinger of a new industrial and economic and social revolution.