India can lead the fourth industrial revolution, says Prime Minister Modi

India may have missed being a part of earlier industrial revolutions, but it could lead the fourth industrial revolution given the right confluence of factors like demography, demand and decisive governance, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said Friday.

“Digital technology has today made deep inroads into the everyday life of common people as well as in industry,” he said in a written message for the ‘National Conference on Industry 4.0: Challenges and Way Forward’ organized by the Ministry of Heavy Industries.

“It is in this context that we have worked on reforms and incentives to make India a tech-powered manufacturing hub of the world,” the Prime Minister said. “The industry and our entrepreneurs play a particularly critical role in making India a vital link in global value chains.”


Industry 4.0 refers to the rapid and significant transformation to manufacturing brought about by digitsation and technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning. The change is so substantial that it has been dubbed as an industrial revolution, the fourth one in modern history.

The conference on Friday also marked the launch of 75 electric buses for Gujarat and 100 such buses for Karnataka by Mahendra Nath Pandey, the minister of heavy industries.

“We have supplied 3,449 buses so far under the FAME scheme,” Pandey said. “Our target is to procure 7,000 buses.”

The buses will help cut the pollution in cities while also providing a sustainable means of transport for the youth and the less fortunate, the minister said.

During the conference, eminent industry executives said that the time to invest in upgrading the manufacturing to industry 4.0 standards had come and the changes would benefit not just large manufacturers but even the medium, small and micro industries.

“Industry 4.0 is an idea whose time has come,” said Ravindra Utgikar, vice president, corporate strategy and marketing at Praj Industries.