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Europe and India: The Way Ahead for Transport

Editor — Mon, 29 Mar 2021 15:39:34 +0000

How European tech can integrate with India’s transport development

By Mangal Dev, Head of Hitachi Rail, India and South Asia region

For European and Italian firms there are good opportunities in the Indian transport sector: the Indian government is open to external specialist technology companies that would like to set up their complete value chain for global markets from India.

Why India? The country offers a myriad of opportunities not only in terms of skilled human resources, raw materials, and an ecosystem of start-ups and SMEs, but also a favorable environment when it comes to ease of doing business.

More importantly, India offers a market of 1.3 billion people.

The country’s goal is to become a 5 trillion dollar economy and that means it needs to greatly accelerate its infrastructure development.

It’s important to look at the ongoing transformation, policies and plans based on important budget allocations for transport infrastructure: railways, highways, and urban transport, waterways and airports.
Many Italian and European companies are already expanding in India, seizing the opportunities offered by the major infrastructure development currently underway.

So, how can cooperation between European technology integrators and companies ready to receive and adapt these technologies in countries with a large user base, such as India, be developed?

Companies driven by the Sustainable Development Goals have a long-term outlook and will find it easier to cooperate with each other, as the technological complementarity with a strong foundation will be equally important to consider.

Most of the time the challenge is posed by the need for change unless there is a strong desire, a willingness to innovate for efficiency and productivity for a bigger cause.

However, this ‘higher cause’ — one that is common for the organization, the community and the country — is seldom an ideal driver for such change. Therefore, the role of a change management facilitator has become quite important to help drive the meaning of the change for its economic, social and environmental value.

India is a vast country with a market that is to be viewed to have a favorable pyramid top, accessible to all foreign companies based on the solutions with features satisfying European market needs with a European cost base.

The middle layer is most crucial, it demands innovation with design frugality and is best attempted by local leadership and local talent, the success of which should be measured by a different yardstick, enabled by the impetus of its foreign parent. Addressing the middle layer will unlock the unorganized bottom layer of the pyramid as well but with complete flexibility and authority in the hands of the local management.

Could India become a model for the application of transport technologies which can be replicated in other SAARC areas?
If you succeed in India, it will be much easier to replicate that model in other SAARC regions. For example, what is successful in West Bengal can easily be replicated in Bangladesh, what is successful in Tamil Nadu is likely to be successful in Sri Lanka, and so on.

India will offer (large) scale volumes for SAARC countries, and the hub-and-spoke model will therefore create good cohesion between a specific region in India and its neighboring SAARC partner with ease of connectivity in the same time zone.

If being successful in India means technology exchange, can trainers be brought in to upgrade the country’s local workforce and develop their tech skills uniformly so that they’ll be on par with other developed nations?
With the industry 4.0 revolution driving digitalization, AI, ML and IoT, there will be a constant need to retrain human resources in their respective job functions.

This means that retraining and upgrading the Indian workforce’s skill sets calls for an effective, interactive educational environment and rotational job training.

However, it will take experienced trainers to assess the individuals and the best practices for a given situation, so it will be productive to work towards developing in-house training staff to ensure the consistency and scalability of the programs. Such programs should be implemented locally in India and perhaps even as a joint initiative between several like-minded companies.

India also has initiatives underway to generate ideas for reducing road traffic, such as a recent seminar organized by the Indian government, under the leadership of Prime Minister Modi on “Make in India”, in which all ministries, government agencies, public and state companies as well as private industry partners were brought together.

There, the goal of the workshop was initiated from the top, continued through government agencies, and then to the (local) executive bodies. In two days of workshops, divided into several working groups, healthy debates were held and a common consensus reached.

The road maps prepared by each of the working groups were then presented to the PM. Indian Railways also organized a brainstorming session with their employees, which resulted in some out-of-the-box ideas. These conclaves are absolutely necessary, but what is important are the final objectives and the total commitment with the involvement of all stakeholders.

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Trailblazing Technopreneurs

Editor — Wed, 28 Oct 2020 10:18:21 +0000

India’s women step up with innovative high-tech solutions

By Suroopa Chatterjee

India, often viewed as the crucible of entrepreneurs or entrepreneurship, has thousands of success stories both within and outside its geographical boundaries. Much of a nation’s growth is fuelled by the innovations and entrepreneurial skills of its citizens.

According to a PWC report, India’s corporate sector lacks the capacity to generate the 12 million jobs needed each year to absorb the flood of job market entrants unleashed by India’s demographic dividend. The entrepreneurial sector must therefore also play a major role; it has the operational nimbleness and conceptual depth to create the radical new solutions required for a vibrant future economy.

Experts see the tech industry reaching phenomenal heights, spearheaded by countries like China and India.
With India’s open market of over a billion consumers, 40% are expected to emerge from poverty over the next two decades, a number of them being first time tech users. Many see Asia as the future of the internet—with over 60% of the global population—and as a place where everything will gradually go online with 5G.

For the last couple of years the world has been driven and almost moulded by the tech industry. Disruptions like AI, data analytics, and robotics are new formats that almost all sectors are adopting. Disruptions usher in sudden changes that alter norms and make the existing environment embrace challenges. New trends and ways of doing things spring forth, making it a defining moment.

Entrepreneurship is a driving force that should not just limit itself to growth-oriented business sectors in urban metropolitan areas but should seep into the heartland of its smaller villages and towns.

Women innovators and entrepreneurs are progressively making a noticeable dent in guiding this force, which is impacting essential sectors like healthcare, agrobusiness and the like. India has seen the emergence of many new faces and their contributions, before and after the start of the pandemic, which are helping to create a bright future for women’s entrepreneurship.

However, while it has its advantages, in many societies and especially in the Indian context, technology has also alienated a vast section of the senior population. For the most part, older people still feel more comfortable in an analogue world.

Aparna Thakker, CEO and Founder of Empowerji, has successfully identified the need for learning opportunities for seniors and made training videos on how to use Apps, websites and other technologies, as these are part of literally everything one does in the new world. Her content is driven by what seniors might find useful to empower them to understand and effectively use technology to take care of their daily needs.

Megha Agarwal, Founder and CEO at Leap Skills Academy, started her organization in New Delhi having identified the need for girls, especially those from suburbs, who required their basic skills to be integrated with technical skills to make them job ready or employable. The focus of the academy is to work with motivated students from smaller towns and cities and give them a leg up to realize their aspirations by creating a high-quality, large-scale solution with a sustainable cost structure.

Women technopreneurs have been outstandingly effective players when it comes to using technology to find solutions in this dynamic world with ever changing needs.

For Ayushi Mishra, biomedical engineer and co-founder of Dronamaps, based in Gurugram, it was all about using technology with purpose that paved the way for solutions during the recent pandemic. She and her team designed a live dashboard that tracked and traced COVID patients, which was initially designed for a Punjabi Government project.

But its success has seen it spread to other states. Dronamaps has been used to fence off quarantined patients, cluster analysis of the spread and also aid in location tracking as well as making predictive analyses for spatial spread on the basis of specific parameters.

Recently featured in Vogue India, she joins the ranks of two other technopreneurs—Dr Rachna Dave and Dr Pooja Rao—who also made an impressive impact by using technology for providing life solutions.

For Dr Rachna Dave, microbiologist and co-founder of Chennai-based Microgo, it’s all about keeping lives safe and conserving resources. Her product, Goassure, is a cost-effective hand sanitizer that saves on water waste. Currently she and her team are engaged in finding a solution that would help people avoid wearing a mask in flu-like conditions.

For India’s leading data scientist Dr Pooja Rao—who co-founded Qure.AI, located in Mumbai—AI was a tool that she wanted to use to create state of the art tools in the diagnostics field. She identified the lacuna in healthcare delivery because of an inadequate number of healthcare professionals for bringing instant diagnostics to the patients. She and her team developed a system that analyses and diagnoses medical images like X rays, CT scans, and MRI scans.

The Covid crisis also further caused QURE.Ai to devise AI-fuelled response solutions. With the onset of the pandemic she and her team redesigned their Xray AI tool.
Through specific algorithms they were able to effectively detect a specific type of pneumonia, in the same way that real doctors can identify new diseases based on past learning. Many clinics and hospices in the UK and India are using this tool after seeing its utility, especially during the ongoing pandemic.

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