Address Atthe International Institute Of Information Technology

Knowledge Society and its dimensions

I am indeed delighted to be here in International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad for formally dedicating this institute of higher learning and advanced research to the nation. Today IT and telecom are becoming the accelerators of service levels that could be extended to every citizen and multiplier of user segments sharing the knowledge products for development. I would like to congratulate the Government of Andhra Pradesh and the management of this institution for having established such a platform for the youth to carry out higher learning and advanced research and development in information and software technologies and their societal, scientific, industrial and financial applications. Time has come for us to communicate our innovative contributions to global IT and gear up to become world leaders in the race of IT development and deployment.

We have seen that growth of IT and telecommunication in India has established that the data transformed into information has a business proposition which has given a competitive advantage. I am sure by the end of this decade, entire India will have IT enabled services in the fields of human resource, customer interaction, finance and accounting, data search and integration, e-education, tele-medicine and e-governance.

ICT ? India?s Core Competence

Our core competencies that can be exploited in addition to what has been planned in 1998 include Information Security, Scientific Software development, e-governance that can spearhead a strong Domestic market, Entertainment, Education, Hardware and chip design and Wireless. If we explore these areas of our core competency we can create Indian MNCs and could aim at a target of 150 billion dollars by the year 2010. Our Industry is capable of delivering the right goods every time and all the time.

Knowledge society components

In the 21st century, a new society is emerging where knowledge is the primary production resource instead of capital and labour. Efficient utilisation of this existing knowledge can create comprehensive wealth for the nation. Such a knowledge society has two very important components driven by societal transformation and wealth generation. The societal transformation has to be through large-scale development in education, healthcare, agriculture and governance. These in turn will lead to employment generation, high productivity and rural prosperity. How do we do that? For us to be in the Knowledge society, we need three networks - The Knowledge Network, the Transport Network and the River Network. I am very happy that the IT industry of the country had amply demonstrated the economic advantages and possible wealth generation by the electronic network- this network permits knowledge to pass between villages, towns, cities and even the continents. The IT industry has shown that by transferring bits and bytes across geographically dispersed locations, knowledge multiplies and generates wealth. The national initiative in building golden quadrilateral transport super highways cris crossing the country is already underway and will soon become the pride of the nation. In similar way we need connectivity among the villages providing them urban amenities.

PURA - Providing Urban amenities in Rural Areas

I envisage Rural Models to share / augment service capabilities to cater to the IT enabled service demands from local in addition to foreign sources. Such models should aim to provide opportunity for rural economic development and prosperity. Youth in the rural localities could be easily trained to cater to requirement of IT enabled service industries. We can get place and manpower at very cheaper rates when compared to urban localities. This will also aid in stopping movement of families towards urban localities. The model envisages a habitat designed to improve the quality of life in rural places and makes special suggestions to remove urban congestion also. Naturally our most demanding urban problem is that of congestion removal and efficient supply of water and effective waste disposal in every locality are the paramount civic needs. There is a minimum size below which a habitat is not viable and not competitive with the existing congested city. At the same time, the existing congested city is not economical compared to a new town once a minimum size of expansion is crossed.

Knowledge powered rural development is an essential need for transforming India into a knowledge power and high bandwidth rural connectivity is the minimum requirement to take education, health care and economic dynamism to the rural areas. Knowledge society leading to knowledge super power can prosper and survive only in the environment of economic security and internal security. Nation has to work for transformation into 'developed India'. Road maps on certain areas have been generated where we have to work for. PURA will show how electronic connectivity can be used to reduce the load on physical transport network. For example, if you can find that you can book your railway tickets through the web in a secure and reliable way, you will not have to take the car or scooter and go to the railway station. Many day to day activities that require you to commute can be done electronically, even generating a new breed of workers- particularly in our Women - who telecommute.

Technology for disabled

I was recently in Kolkata interacting with 9000 children at the Netaji Indoor Stadium. One boy suffering from visual impairment asked me, ?Sir, what kind of education facilities are provided in the Knowledge Society, for visually handicapped children like me?? There are many like him. Let me share one thought with you. I had met many physically and mentally challenged children at Rashtrapati Bhavan and also during my visits to various States. My belief all along was reconfirmed that these children like all others have an equal urge to pursue their studies and work. We have to provide solutions to their problems with the aid of Information Technology, by developing audio books, talking websites, voice assistive interfaces and other devices. I am happy to note that this institution, I I I T, Hyderabad, has developed lot of reading aids for the visually handicapped and I am delighted to release the same today here.

Robotics in Healthcare

By providing the use of a variety of technologies to enhance the capabilities of human surgeons, robotics will become an increasingly vital component in the medical world. India should venture into such futuristic technologies with our strength in ICT to complement their capabilities in order to provide better patient care. Robotic Surgery is certainly not a fancy equipment or technology for show. It is future. Availability of a Robotic Surgery System in India would trigger a similar effort that had brought indigenous Stent, Tele-medicine and Cath. Lab system. Keeping in view the core-competence that Indian Institutions and Industry have already achieved, an equivalent indigenous system should be possible at 25% of the international price. The future computers would work more and more like the human brain. According to Ray Kurzweil, the author of the famous book ?the Age of the Spiritual machines?, the 1000 dollar computer in 2009 will perform trillion calculations per second, in 2019, a million trillion calculations per second- equaling the power of the human brain. By 2029, it will have the power of 1000 human brains. Hence the human beings in future can offload some of their functions to the computer based robotics and make use of their brain to effectively beat the computer through human innovation and imagination capabilities. My greetings to IIIT and CARE foundation for having conceived the project of indigenous development of Robotic and Interactive surgery technologies. I am happy to launch this project and I am sure this project will demonstrate that India plays a progressive role in using technology for healthcare.

The Indian Software Industry:

Today the software industry in India is nearly 10 billion dollars strong, with a flat domestic market of 2 billion dollars contributing 16% of nation's exports. While in the next ten years, we aim at the Nation's GDP to be doubled, the software industry's contribution is expected to increase at least 10 folds. Software and Hardware industries will becomes a formidable component of the nation's wealth.

After the September 11th incident, the Industry went through difficulties. Though it must be said in defence of our great visionaries in the Indian IT field that India did not feel the effect as much as other developed nations, many Indian companies did shut down and many young went jobless - albeit temporarily. The basic lesson that we have learnt in the post September 11 era, is that "our software industry has to be made more robust and less fragile, if we are going to make it the most significant contributor to our economy". Tremendous market potential that is available in our country in the area of tele-education, tele-medicine, infotainment, e- governance etc., need to be explored. If IT touches every one of the billion Indian people, the IT market will become phenomenally large. This will ensure absolute robustness. But, today the growing domestic market has been left mainly to the government. Indian IT Industries have to evolve a long term strategy for thoughtful investments and grow the domestic market without solely depending on the Government. This, in the long run will show that one can do IT business with social benefits and still make an economic sense. In addition, our market base can be expanded actively to include Europe, China, Korea, Japan and many other developing countries.

I believe the Governments, Industry and the academia can take this issue of increasing the domestic IT segment through strong and sustainable use of IT for Education and Health care by bringing out a roadmap. Let us look at our IT industry employing 500,000 people earning 10 billion $ which is one percent of the world market, from another perspective. At the same time a typical international software company with 50,000 employees earns 20 billion $ through its world wide operations.

Based on the current trend, if we have to reach 80 B$ we will have to multiply our workforce 8 times which may not make our operations competitive. Hence our software industry has to move up the value chain and come up with innovative products that will sweep the world. I am confident that the Indian Industry would soon come up with such mega initiatives. A country which has seen what is networking of talents to make more than 20,000 man year projects in satellites, fighter aircraft, launch vehicles, atomic energy and missiles, can certainly think of networking of talents in our industry, research laboratories and the academia. This will ensure emergence of many Indian Multinationals that would bring per capita revenues almost ten times higher than what we do today. Today, our IT Industry is proud that 260 out of the Fortune 500 companies are its clients- When we march towards a Developed India, I would like the IT Industry to lead the march by proclaiming that "260 of the Fortune 500 companies are Indian MNCs?. This is my dream.

Indian Hardware Industry

While we see the stupendous growth of the software Industry, one cannot forget that this has also come with investments on Hardware of foreign origin like about 1.88 million PCs, over 2 Lakh hubs etc. The rapid penetration of Cell phones and the possible standardization of "Citizen Smart Card" shows that, by proper planning, the country would find emerging opportunities in the hardware industry.

A mission has to be initiated for bringing out a national citizen card for multiple use such as voter ID card, bank operations card, ration card. The Mission of national citizen card / smart card has to be an integrated approach of multiple departments and industries. I understand that technological requirements for such a card is within our capabilities and capacity. I would urge Indian electronics majors to form consortium with local chip manufacturers to rise up to this emerging market.

In the next twenty years, we will witness wearable computers with disposable wireless enabled hardware, possible entry of low cost robots and even the Cyborg. The "thinking and spiritual machines" are talked about as reality. The hardware market will grow far more faster than anything that we have witnessed so far. My belief is that relying only on SW, may not be the best strategy for the future. India should emerge as not only a "Software Giant" but an "ICT giant" with equal strength in SW, HW, embedded systems design, integration, and total end to end solutions. With these remarks, Friends I have great pleasure in dedicating this International Institute of Information Technology to the nation.

Conclusion

Friends, Information Technology and knowledge workers have got a tremendous responsibility to contribute in the areas of tele-medicine, tele-education and e-governance for rural areas apart from their business role. PURA (Providing Urban Amenities to Rural Area) has to be a business proposition economically viable and managed by entrepreneurs and small scale industrialists with government participation, as it involves education, health, power generation, transport and management. IT would become a potent tool in integrating the nation. The remote localities that are now feeling a sense of neglect will no longer feel so. Time and distance will be condensed to bring about a nation that is efficiently small, competitive and dynamic.

One of the ingredient for the country to become a developed country is that its languages must also be developed in a digital era. That means we must have search engines, word processing tools, optical character recognizers. Speech recognizers, automatic summarizers, and machine translators. I am aware about the complexities of the problem . I am happy to know that IIIT is making certain contributions in the development of Language Technologies particularly Indian Languages.

Knowledge Management, Information extraction and retrieval pertaining to English and Indian languages. Civilisation that does not have the knowledge of technology or the technological nations without experience of civilization, cannot innovate newer economy. India has a rich civilization and post independent India has focused itself as a technology leader in Space, Defence, Agriculture and certain areas of Industry. With IT and telecom emerging as core competence of the nation, transforming India into a knowledge society, I see the developed India is not too far.

My best wishes to the Information and Communication Technology Community.