India’s leading strategy firm with nation-building at its core, Primus Partners, in partnership with ASSOCHAM, unveiled the report titled ‘Futuristic Technologies: Is India Ready?’ at the Futuristic Technologies Seminar organized by ASSOCHAM in Kolkata on Friday, in the presence of Shri Randhir Kumar, Secretary, Dept. of IT & Electronics, West Bengal, & Managing Director, WEBEL. The report stated the rising urgency for various stakeholders including state governments to adopt policies that support the inclusion of futuristic technologies as it would be key to creating a gigantic impact on multifarious sectors. As part of the report, Primus Partners and ASSOCHAM conducted a survey where 90% of respondents agree that futuristic technologies will be important for India in the coming times and 79% of respondents believe that the gigantic impact on BFSI, Healthcare, Retail, and Manufacturing sectors will be led by their steadfastness in adopting these technologies and optimizing its usage for sectoral growth.

The report charts a comprehensive analysis and recommendations for integrating government policies and new-age digital technology such as Blockchain, AI/ML, Web3.0, Cloud, and Metaverse to reimagine strategies for newer experiences and improved ways of conducting business. The day-to-day impact of adopting these new-age technologies will be an absolute game changer and have an overall positive effect on the mass as 97% of respondents surveyed across India believe that futuristic technologies will make life easier and save time and cost. Moreover, government initiatives like the Smart Cities Mission and Digital India programme have immense potential for incorporating IoT goods and services. It further highlights foreseeable challenges such as understanding the technology, cyber-attacks, and internet speed in the country. However, India’s favourable demographics, growing economy, availability of talent, the 5G rollout, a large start-up ecosystem, and smartphone penetration will become powerful tools to combat them and find meaningful solutions for an elevated experience.

Expanding its horizon to other sectors, ASSOCHAM and Primus Partners’ report also highlighted the importance of strategically shifting towards futuristic technologies for the rapidly growing fintech industry given its revolutionary prowess to transform the growth of the country’s GDP. While India currently has more than 6636 fintech start-ups and 21 unicorns, collaborations with banks, insurance firms, and the retail sector will increase their influence and radically transform the Indian banking and financial industries. Moreover, operating through various business models, its impact has trickled down to the e-commerce industry as it continues to bloom further by offering customer-centric offers, ease of use, and availability of personal and commercial transactions globally. To expedite the friendliness of e-commerce platforms, an important step will be to adopt Big Data for incorporating analytics-driven decision-making mechanisms. The statistics highlight the immediate need for drafting a policy framework on the ethics of data for ease of implementation of such technologies in public and private organizations. 

Sharing his insights on the report, Devroop Dhar, Managing Director, Primus Partners said, “With more than 450 active start-ups in the Web 3.0 domain, the sector is steadily growing in India. We will need to plan, implement, and employ next-generation technologies such as web computing, artificial intelligence, smart cities, blockchain, and the internet of things to yield the maximum benefit. These technologies will also become an important part of swift and efficient governance. The survey we conducted revealed that 93% of respondents believe in the increasing need for governments to adopt futuristic technologies for citizen service delivery. This process may then be enhanced for a choice-based proactive service delivery model based on family ID. The arrival of 5G will boost India’s adaptability to these technologies given its high bandwidth, low latency, and highly reliable communication system.”

Commenting on the role of consumers and governments driving growth through technological breakthroughs, Perminder Jeet Kaur, Senior Director – East and North East and National Coordinator for the National Task Force on Ayush &  Early Child Education, ASSOCHAM said “We, as consumers, have played a critical role in maximizing the impact of these technologies by adopting technology-led innovations and allowing tech enablers to collect more data for customized and improved experiences. India, today, is well positioned to consolidate its position as a global leader in the era post the fourth industrial revolution owing to one of the world's youngest labour forces and a significant amount of technical aptitude. With the right combination of regulatory frameworks, India can lead this technological revolution.”

In the last ten years, technology has made incredible advances that are still changing our world. Today, it serves as the foundation for all potential future growth and enables the building of a more inclusive and sustainable society. With more than 50% of India’s population under the age of 27, arises an important task for collaboration between institutions and industries to frame policies that encourage upskilling and training the youth of the country to thrive in these dynamic industries.