Digital India will bring newer ideas

S Mohini Ratna Editor VARINDIA With the upcoming budget likely to focus on promoting the culture of product development and innovation, the economy is, no doubt, expected to flourish with the help of digital ecosystem. But, for this to happen, the entire R&D budget for IT companies should be exempted from levies and the transfer pricing made simpler and practical. The Indian IT industry is geared for innovation and global competition. Though we boast of a massive talent base in India, the reality is that we are still overly dependent on imports, especially in electronics and telecom. India being the second-largest smartphone consumer in the world after the US, lots of electronic goods are being imported. India spends $100 billion on the consumption of electronics every year, most of which are imported and these include products like mobile phones, computers, SIM cards, smart cards, set-top boxes, LED lights, cameras, televisions, medical electronics. There is no denying the fact that, though research is done in India, IPRs are still with other countries, which mean that we are buying the same products at higher costs from those countries. There is a great need for developing a mechanism that would necessitate interacting with the industry before developing any technology or solution rather than at the post-development stage. By complementing various initiatives of the Government like Make-in-India programme to encourage local and foreign manufacturers to manufacture in India for domestic and export markets, Digital India for empowering Indians with the power of technology that will eventually help in the creation of digital infrastructure, delivery of governance and on-demand services with special incentives by the Government like Preferential Market Access (PMA) will reinvigorate the Indian IT and telecom fraternity and very soon India will be the world’s fastest-growing economy, leaving behind China. Going ahead, the 100-smart city initiative will offer vast opportunities like automation of street lights where EESL is working strongly towards it. The project will cost around US$10 billion, and the opportunity is for installing 27.5 million street lights across the country with 7 million new lights to be added every year. Currently, many cities and towns are planning to change all their old street lights into LED lights and make them smart by automating their controls. Until now, the traditional automation technologies like GSM or GPRS based have been in use for the past 15 years. But the challenge here will be on how to use the next-generation technologies which are evolving for most efficient real-time connectivity, with less or no operating cost for making smart city and Make-in-India a great success. With the Union budget going to be tabled in Parliament this month, we all await some good tidings in terms of market-friendly policies and development regulations towards the upliftment of the IT industry. Hope India carries forward its legacy of the best-performing equity and ranks ninth on the league table of market capitalization (m-cap).