By Deepak Bagla*
Never before in the free world has transformation happened in such a manner as we are witnessing in India today. It’s a big statement and let me explain that.
Transformation both in terms of scale and the pace at which it is happening. Let me tell about the scale first.
By 2024-25 we will be 1.5 billion; we have 1.4 today. We will be the highest human resource within a single national boundary on the planet. Let me tell you more interesting about a billion of those will be under the age of 35. With an average age of 29 again we will be the youngest nation in the world at least for the next eight years. Think of the power which is coming in with it and the power each one of you have to change the world and transform the platform on which you are. That’s the scale!
Well let me tell you the pace at which it is changing in the past 18 months, and let’s just look at the size first. If we look at GDP as a number, the gross domestic product to see the size of a nation India has moved ahead of Russia, Italy, Brussels, France equalling UK from number 10 to number five, you’re a little over three trillion dollars today. That number is going to be 10 trillion dollars by the end of this decade. We will be in the top three. We will be one of the biggest juggernauts on the planet.
Let me now show you the pace at which we are changing. We all agree, and I’m sure you will join me on this – The data is the new oil! That’s the power of data now. That is what is going to generate the power of growth as we go forward.
Just 48 months ago India’s global position as per capita data usage was about 120 223. What was that position just 24 months ago? Take a guess. India was number one in the world. We consumed more per capita mobile data than the US and China put together. That is the pace at which we are changing. That is the pace at which we are growing.
Today we are over 750 million people on the net, but every second three new people are joining the net; two of them from a village in India. By 2024-25, we’ll have over a billion people with a mobile phone, a billion people with a unique bank account attached to a bank account, a billion people with a unique identity number and over a billion on the net.
The power of this digitisation is unprecedented. And this entire space and the campaign and the focus and the program of Digital India, to my mind, is one of the biggest transformational points in the history of India which has now brought us to an inflection point where we are just rounding the bottom end of that hockey stick ready to take on the vertical and this vertical is now in our hands to manoeuver and to empower the digital India campaign.
The digital India initiative which was started by Prime Minister (Narendra) Modi is now transforming this entire country across every axis of diversity. In my mind for the first time in human history will we have each and every individual citizen of this country empowered on a sense of democratization. That means they will have equal opportunity and access to the opportunities which growth is bringing to the advantages, which growth is bringing for education, for health care, for everything. And just imagine the power unleashed when 1.5 billion minds and pairs of hands are there to generate and empower this engine.
It is completely unprecedented, and this is what is the world we all are going to step in. It’s also going to be a world and India which is not going to be powered just by 10 or 12 major centres, but the engine of growth through that digitization has moved to the small towns and cities of India and the villages of India.
So the next stage of growth which we all are now going to step in is going to be a bottom-up and let me give you one example of that. Many of us are going to be joining startups. We know Startup India is a very young story. We all recollect, startup was launched by the honourable Prime Minister in January 16, 2016. So that means we are just about 72 months old in this world of startups. In fact, many ways we are a startup nation. But let’s see what we’ve achieved in this period of 72 months. Today we are number three in the world in number of unicorns. In 2020, we added one unicorn every 31 days. In 2021, we added one unicorn every nine day. In fact, in the third quarter of last year we added the highest number of unicorns in the world. We had 44 unicorns last year. In fact, this year we’ve just completed January, and we are just starting February, we already have eight unicorns.
Remember the pace at which India is changing, and each one of us is now out there to power that unicorn. We are number two in the world in number of startups. And why I’m really very excited about this part is because today we have a startup in over 660 districts of India. You know India has about 740 districts. So when I mentioned that the new India is going to be empowered and engined by the power which is going to be bottom up from all these small towns and cities, that’s where I say it from. That is the democratisation of opportunity. That is the democratisation of access and contribution to the growth of a nation.
Each one of these individuals; each one of our human resource citizens is empowered today. Each one of us are out not to change our own life, not to change the life of the city around us, but to change the life of everyone in this country and across the world. And the most interesting thing about these startups- they’re coming up with solutions which are not just for the top 500 of the world’s population, but the entire 8 billion of the world’s population. That is where even within this pandemic, even during these worst of times we have been firmly established as the ones which gave out medicines to the entire world, even when we were trying to protect ourselves and we gave solutions to the world.
I’ll give you an example. On 30th of March last year, when the lockdown started, sometime then we did not have PPEs in India. We did not have any ventilators. And I know the businesses pivoted their business models. They were nimble and they came up with these solutions.
This is a new India which is changing at a rapid pace. And one of the biggest strengths of this new India and all of us is, that we are one of the few societies and countries in the world which is good at both adapting to change and adopting change; and it is this ability to both adopt and adapt is the strength of frugal innovation. And it is the strength and the ability to come up with a solution and a can-do attitude which is now firmly positioned India as one of the most acknowledged major powers in the world.
We are now entering a world at a time where everything is possible but nothing is certain. It’s a challenging time. What that means? We will have to constantly, regularly upgrade ourselves and upgrade our skills. I don’t see any more lifelong jobs which were there in our generation. The youth will probably have multiple jobs, and one job may be very different from the other. They have to prepare for that world.
The strength which we in our society have given us is the ability to be nimble, that frugal innovation and that ability to adopt and adapt. That is what is going to propel India in the top position in the whole world. It’s a strong brand India today. It’s a brand which everybody acknowledges for its excellence and intelligence.
*Deepak Bagla is Managing Director & Chief Executive Officer of Invest India, which is the National Investment Promotion and Facilitation Agency that helps investors looking for investment opportunities and options in India. The writeup is an edited version of the excerpts from his speech delivered virtually at the recently concluded 32nd Annual Convocation Ceremony of BIMTECH, Greater Noida.
Article courtesy: Professor Saloni Sinha, Incharge Media Conduit, BIMTECH
