ET GBS: Affordable access to technology a must for wider Internet penetration

NEWS DELHI: India's digital divide, access to technology and focus on software rather than hardware was the subject of intense discussions by a panel on Digital India: New Rules for the New Economy, at the Economic Times Global Business Summit 2016 on Saturday.

The panel was chaired by telecom and IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad and comprised of Randi Zuckerberg, Founder & CEO of Zuckerberg Media, Rishad Premji, Chief Strategy Officer at Wipro, Akhil Gupta, vice chairman, Bharti Enterprises, Rajan Anandan, MD, Google, South East Asia & India, and R, Chandrasekhar, president of Nasscom.

Zuckerberg spoke about how women should be trained on the uses of technology and efforts should be made to make technology interesting for them, rather than just another instrument in their daily lives, or just a chore.

Google's Anandan said that India should make access to Internet affordable for deeper penetration. He added that that the country's focus on its strength, which is software, rather than hardware over the next years. He said that over the time, India could be successful in artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, among others.

Premji spoke how Wipro is making investments to develop more software, adding that the challenge was to build business models for people in rural India. He said that sectors like healthcare and agriculture provide so many opportunities. In village panchayats, for example, the value of information was extremely high,

Nasscom's Chandrasekhar said that the government's job should be to enable the infrastructure and then allow business a free hand to put moving parts together.

Bharti's Gupta said that a billion people should be connected to the Internet in a short span of time, say two to three years, and that the mobile industry has a big role to play in this.

He however said that the telecom industry is one of the most taxed industries today, which should be rationalised.