By TIOL News Service

NEW DELHI, NOV 22, 2024: INDIA is the best place in the world to provide sustainable infrastructure to the digital world. This was stated by Union Commerce and Industry Minister, Piyush Goyal while speaking at UK India Business Council's 'UK-India Technology Futures Conference' in New Delhi yesterday.

Goyal pointed out that it will be important to understand how in the future the digital world and sustainability issues will intersect. Major portion of energy will be consumed by systems that will churn out data and that will have an impact on sustainability issues, he said, adding that there are very few places in the world where there is interconnected grid in the way that India has. He said that by 2030 India would have a thousand-gigawatt grid connected through the length and breadth of the country with a healthy mix of traditional and renewable energy. For data centers, this huge amount of clean energy provides an unheard-of reliability and sustainability, he said, pointing out that India provides an unmatched opportunity for investors across the world.

Advocating India as the best place to invest in technology and innovation, Goyal informed that in addition to a robust legal system, India is going to bring out a new legal framework to ensure data privacy that will encourage free flow of data among trusted partners.

Goyal said that India and UK can work together to leverage the high level of innovation that UK's universities produce. India has lowest cost data in terms of per GB of data and is also the largest consumer of data, he said. India has the highest number of STEM graduates coming out of colleges and coupled with the demand being produced by an emerging market, it makes India an excellent opportunity to partner in emerging fields, he said. Today India is the fastest growing telecom market in the world and India has seen the fastest rollout of 5g anywhere in the world and soon all of India will be 5g connected, Goyal pointed out, adding that India has the necessary ecosystem and infrastructure to help us to engage with the developed world.

India is working on many dimensions of technology, including space sector, and in animation, gaming, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, Goyal said, adding that India has invested through public funding in semiconductor industry in a big way. He quoted Prime Minister Narendra Modi who had said that it is our dream that every device in the world will one day have India made chip.

Goyal said that he has five suggestions to offer in the areas of collaboration between India and UK in technology: first, in AI learning the two countries can create platforms for personalized training and virtual reality can become a part of our curriculum in education; second, collaboration in tele-medicine can bring down cost of medical health in UK and make quality healthcare available to the remotest part of India; third, the two countries can collaborate in developing climate modelling tools to help the world be in a  better position to predict and manage natural disasters; fourth, precision farming tools and residue free farming are the areas where India can benefit with increasing productivity; and lastly, industries in organic chemicals, engineering goods and food products are undergoing a churn due to technological advances and the two countries can collaborate to take advantage of the opportunities that this represents.