Swadesh, released in 2004, was a landmark movie in which the young hero, Mohan Bhargav, portrayed rather brilliantly by Shah Rukh Khan, goes back, straight from building rockets at NASA, to his village. The movie has a happy ending, with villagers building their own technology, inspired by the hero.
Unfortunately, things aren't so good in the around 6,50,000 villages housing 65% of India's population, that is, close to 90 crore people. These villages are largely driven by an agricultural economy. Trapped between increasing extreme climatic events like floods and drought and poor availability of affordable farm credit, they have a restless young population that aspires to migrate to cities, looking for ever-illusive jobs and their future growth.
Rebuilding the decaying rural economy is going to get even tougher with the upcoming intelligence explosion and advances in AI & Robotics. These breakthroughs are threatening to upend how we live, work and travel, thus potentially driving up massive inequality, between the intelligence haves and have-nots.
The Intelligence Economy
By 2030, it is estimated that 7.5 billion connected humans will be living together with 30 billion intelligent and connected machines in the intelligence economy, creating $15.7 trillion of new economic value by 2030, according to PWC's research. The pace at which this change is occurring is unsettling even for a person like me, who has spent the last 15 years working closely with AI as an entrepreneur and as an investor. Roughly speaking, we had taken 300-plus years and a couple of world wars to absorb the Industrial Revolution, and another 50 years to digest the IT/Digital revolution. But we are going to zip through the intelligence revolution in a 10-15 year time period. This transition is going to be rapid and might result in societal and geopolitical instability, unless planned carefully. If we try building Viksit Bharat without enabling our villages to leapfrog from a largely agriculture-based economy to the intelligence economy, we will soon see an abundance of humongous cities like Delhi that are hard to keep under control with their teeming migrant populations, eventually placing extreme pressure on the fragile environment.
The only way forward is to surf the waves of change and opportunities that the intelligence economy is bringing to the table and leverage it to build a digital-physical twin of the sustainable developmental model for a "Viksit Village", embodying these seven strategic pillars of technological innovations-
Advanced infrastructure housing intelligent 5G/6G-connected utilities that manage grid-level air, water, waste and mobility. This would be powered by renewable energy sources, solar and waste to energy systems.
- Next-generational agriculture with precision farming and automated agribots connected to autonomous supply chains globally.
- Precision manufacturing pods with localised micro-manufacturing driven by versatile robots.
- Personalised intelligent healthcare and education that is ready for the future of the AI age with XR devices and AI co-explorers.
- Intelligence-driven local industries paired with remote digital work for data annotations and monitoring service bots.
- Digital public intelligence-driven local self-governance, with AI courts for rapid justice at district level.
- The growth of sustainable development, which a man-machine society with environmental, social, mental and spiritual aspects needs to grow and prosper.
While the urgent need for this massive undertaking is clear, paving the way for this technological change and modelling its impact on society is not an easy task. Globally speaking, there have been a couple attempts at building technologically-driven and advanced cities, such as the Masdar City in the UAE and Songdo in South Korea. But very few have actually attempted to construct a live site at this scale to model the changes needed for our developing world.
The Moonshot Approach
We need to adopt the moonshot approach, taking a leaf out of the late JFK's vision to reach the moon, as we have seen how this built the industrial economy and the military complex of the USA. Considering the ready availability of land needed to build a place as impactful as this, Bengaluru (where the talent and capital required for research and development of such a complex ecosystem is readily available) comes to mind.
For the initial take-off, we can look at existing PSUs (Public Sector Units) that are in dire need of futuristic technology infusion to survive and create a symbiotic relationship with an aim towards economic rebirth. An existing example is the HMT campus in Bengaluru, which was initially set up to bring in precision manufacturing innovations in the early 1950s. It was the dream organisation for many while being the embodiment of manufacturing excellence. HMT also holds a place in my heart as my father bought me my very first watch from HMT. Changes in the technological landscape mean that the HMT needs a "creative re-innovation" of purpose to move forward.
HMT As A Launchpad - An Example
The PSU's unused land and resources can be used in a public-private model to create the site for the intelligent "Viksit Village '' that is built around the seven key strategic technological pillars outlined above. Envisioned on a 400-acre campus that will be capable of housing 10,000 people, and built to vision the next generation embodying a sustainable future, it will feature innovation zones for AI and robotics startups, a global research institute for AI and robotics, global outsourcing hubs for data annotations, AI compute clusters, a data foundry and upskilling zones for existing employees and the workforce of HMT and other manufacturing giants, all working together to make the digital-physical twin real, may be at a pilot hub in the nearby Mandya district.
A viable economic model around land reuse for technological rebirth can mean that HMT's land will be a cradle for future technology innovations and a potential source of new technological IP. It can also act as a channel for a potential go-to market. Headed by an eminent advisory board, with industry leaders of repute and academia, ably supported by the government with a sizable initial grant, it can collaborate with leading Indian and global universities for long-term research under the newly formed NRF (National Research Foundation). It can also host global grand challenges for key technology and research problems, with built-in test beds for AI and robotics solutions in healthcare, education, manufacturing, autonomous mobility and agriculture.
Scaling Up Development
Transforming both the ailing PSU and dormant villages with technology innovations of the "Viksit Village" will make the vision of Viksit Bharat real. Once the developmental model is working on the pilot site, we can look at deploying and transforming initially 100 villages with these innovations. Post that, we can scale the model from the initial 100 to the whole of India's 6,50,000-plus villages eventually, while tweaking for impact and policy feedback. This bottom-up way of building the change that Viksit Bharat aims for might be more effective and less prone to failures than typical top-down execution via mere incentives and policy levers.
The resulting technological innovation goldmine from this exhilarating and challenging journey will make the country the source of the advanced technologies needed for a sustainable tomorrow not just for India but also for the world. This may eventually make for a good plot for the sequel to the original movie, a Swadesh 2.0, where the hero takes the "Viksit Village" technologies from India back to the USA to make it "great again" in a sustainable way.
(Umakant Soni is chairman of AIfoundry and co-founder of ARTPARK(AI & Robotics Technology Park) & a passionate advocate for inclusive development)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author