NEW DELHI — India has been gearing up to become the ultimate digital partner, providing end-to-end, innovative and transformative solutions and services to enterprises across the globe. It faces a historic opportunity to transform into one of the world’s major technology hubs, a report by Asia-based Heinrich Foundation said recently. Today, India is transforming itself into one of the major IT hubs of the world. With a renewed focus on building the local manufacturing capabilities, India has also adequately emphasized developing smartphones and other digital hardware. Alongside these, the government has also looked at encouraging more and more national unicorns to take roots in India, which has proven to be a smart and visionary decision. It becomes interesting that the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi presented India’s thinking on the significance of the IT sector to the industry representatives, global leaders and civil society organizations at the Sydney Dialogue of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute last month. The large-scale faith and trust placed in the Indian IT sector by the larger global community is precisely why the Indian skilling capability has improved drastically over the last two decades. Though these steps are sufficient in themselves to ensure that India is able to cement itself as a technology export hub, other external factors have also played a huge role in aiding India. The ongoing trade dispute between China and United States could ensure that India obtains the boost it needs to become a global tech giant, especially with the US President Joe Biden calling for the creation of a China-free supply chain in strategic industries, like pharmaceutical and biopharma products, batteries, rare earth materials and semiconductors as well. In light of these, a large number of companies that have relied on China for years are now moving to shift their respective productions to Southeast Asia and India in particular. Gradually becoming the third-largest and fastest-growing ecosystem in the world, India has been able to produce unicorns at a rapid pace of one unicorn every 10 days. With the advent of the National Digital Health Mission, India has been working on providing affordable and universal healthcare with large-scale digitisation in a relatively shorter time frame. In a big shot in the arm for India’s skilling capability upgradation, the Productivity-Linked Incentive scheme (PLI) has been able to attract global players in electronics and telecommunications. The most widespread use of technology in India has been seen in operations that have more to do with providing benefits to the citizens. Furthermore, India has now become one of the largest consumers of data with the cheapest mobile data rates in the world as well. A large credit is owed to India’s massive population and the resulting humongous demand for mobile data as well. India has been able to build a new age infrastructure that is both robust as well as strong, secure and private in nature. Using the latest technological advancements, India has been able to accelerate growth on a huge level further emphasising on the fact that data and technology were potent weapons in today’s day and age that would yield positive results if harnessed properly. In India’s case, the IT talent has been able to create an entirely new and state-of-the-art digital economy of its own, contributing substantially to the development of different technologies and services. One of the most recent and successful examples of the same — the CoWin platform — was made available to the entire world for free as an open-source software. With a clear focus on increasing the capacity of the cloud platform, India has turned out to become a leading provider of cyber security solutions to multiple MNCs situated across the world in recent years. As can be seen clearly, the ongoing Indian digital revolution has been able to create a unique digital identity for more than 1.38 billion Indian individuals apart from being able to build the most comprehensive and resilient public information infrastructure of the world. A recent KPMG report on technology innovation hubs shows that Bengaluru ranks among the cities that are the leading technology innovation hubs in the world, and India as a nation ranks highly among the countries and jurisdictions that show the most promise for developing innovative technologies. In addition, through the National Optical Fibre Network program, India has been moving at a rapid pace to connect more than 7 lakh villages through a broadband connection. Therefore, investments being made towards increasing the indigenous capacity in telecom technology like 4G and 5G, which would yield significant results in the future, thereby inducing a massive digital transformation in the multiple sectors of the Indian economy. — Agencies