India is not yet economically rich but will emerge data rich over the next three years, said Nandan Nilekani, chairman, EkStep, and former
chairman, Unique Identification Authority of India.
He was addressing the sixth C K Prahalad Memorial Lecture organised
by the
Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) spoke on the ‘strategic implications’ and ‘the
right strategy’ to be adopted by the country to use the data for the public
good. “It is not a technology issue, but a policy issue. There are three main
components — data colonisation, privacy and a ‘winner takes it all’ approach.”
The amount of data in the world today is equal
to every person in the U.S. tweeting three tweets per minute for 26,976 years
and every person in the world having more than 215 million high-resolution MRI
scans a day, according to data collated by U.S.-based Waterford Solutions,
e-mail and file management solutions company. 2.7 zettabytes of data exists in
the digital universe today.
“A tsunami is going to hit us,” Nilekani said.
“Most Indians will be digitally rich before they become economically rich.”
“There is a knowledge asymmetry when it comes
to giving loans to the poor. Now with GSTN, Aadhaar and UPI, one can find out
if a small businessman is worthy of being given a loan as his banks can
digitally look at the performance of his business. The GSTN network will lay a
large platform for businesses through its e-way bill and BharatBill payments.
The Aadhaar will provide the base. India has a robust authentication structure
in place, like PAN, which can safely authenticate a person. India is in a
unique position.”
India is working on a paperless and cashless
service delivery system that will enable the government, citizens and
entrepreneurs to interact with each other through an open digital platform. The
India Stack programme is the largest application programming interface that is
being developed in order to enable 1.2 billion Indians to get access to goods
and services digitally.
“The right thing to do is to enable the data
to empower its user. It can be used for reskilling them. Also, the government
can manage its economic data. For example, it can say whether the demand for
cold rolled steel has gone up or down,” Nilekani said. “For digital democracy,
government must unlock public data and bring in a new law to prevent misuse of
data.”
Globally, more than 200 billion high
definition movies, which would take a person 47 million years to watch, have
been created and, according to estimates, the volume of business data
worldwide, across all companies, doubles every 1.2 years, says Waterford
Solutions. YouTube users upload 48 hours of new video every minute of the day.
571 new websites are created every minute of the day.
He also gave examples
of companies such as Apple, Amazon and Google which
have a reservoir of data and with use of technologies such as artificial
intelligence and machine learning are able to build new businesses much faster
than others. This could threaten incumbents and make it difficult for other
players to enter into a new segment due to lack of data.
Nilekani cited the
example of Netflix, a company which until fours years ago was in the business
of distributing content from others.
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