India in this decade will lead global economic growth and the systems and technologies that we already have in place will only help accelerate this journey, said Tata Sons, chairman Natarajan Chandrasekaran.

“India has a larger role to play in global growth and our growth will get much stronger in this decade,” forecast Mr. Chandrasekaran, who was in conversation with Microsoft India, President, Anant Maheshwari, at a virtual event, Future Ready, on January 11.

On the country taking lead towards an equitable and sustainable growth, Mr. Chandrasekaran. said, it should be a national priority to enable access to education and healthcare to all irrespective of which part of India people lived in.

“Millions of our children, in the last two years due to the pandemic, could access education as they did not have digital connections. The future is bridgital. We already have the basics and platforms like UPI and Aadhar that have the scale and bandwidth to support millions of people. We need to accelerate,” the head of Tata Sons emphasised.

Responding to Mr. Maheshwari’s query on sustainability, Mr. Chandrasekaran said the pandemic-brought lockdown was a reminder for many about the importance of working on sustainability and environmental issues.

“We could see blue skies and hear chirpings of birds around. We all felt good. Pandemic truly reminded us about the importance of sustainability and highlighted the environmental concerns.”

However, India received a 10-year advantage in terms of change management due to the pandemic and the country must explore this to create momentum towards a sustainable future, he noted.

According to Mr. Chandrasekaran, tech no doubt will make a profound impact on India and its people. The issue in the country is not about addressing the market, but about creating markets and giving people access to markets via technology.

“India has no time or resources to build huge systems. We have to do things near-time to impact a large number of people at a time. We have to make AI and ML relevant for all kinds of people: the field workers, truck drivers, people in rural areas and not just techies and elites,” he added.

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