Bridgital Nation

by N Chandrasekaran

  The world over, countries are grappling with ideas about data and responsibility, hoping to find some kind of balance. If India can create a regime forged from the concerns of every stakeholder, it won’t just be a shining light unto itself—it will illuminate a path for others too.

  Conclusion

  India’s challenges are urgent. It is easy to be trapped in crisis mode, fighting fires as they spring up. To evolve, though, the country has to anticipate and actively design the future it wants.

  To do this, three transformations lie ahead. The first is a technological transformation, in which India develops the capacity of advanced digital tools to address its great challenges. The second is a talent transformation, which will equip its students and workers with the ability to enhance themselves and their prospects through technological augmentation. The third—and perhaps the most important—is a transformation of vision: Rather than muddling through existing constraints, India needs to position itself as a pioneer shaping the future of work.

  Technology

  Too many conversations about how technology will affect the workplace are based on false binaries: human or machine, replace or retain. How India applies technology is a choice. Rather than debating whether (or when) AI will grow smarter than humans, it should instead think deeply about the implications of this most apparent fact: The combination of human and AI will certainly be smarter and more effective than either human or AI alone. Countries that develop smart systems look to derive and refine insights from their data, and tap into the power of technology and data combined to build contextual solutions that meet their needs.

  India is going through a rapid expansion in connectivity. As more and more Indians come online, the volume of data being generated will make it possible to contextualize and customize solutions with greater precision. The development of applications and technologies for use in the last mile in India requires, among other things, a period of testing. Machine learning algorithms, in particular, will show remarkable improvements in performance as they are allowed to work through successive iterations.

  The kinds of technologies India needs to develop will focus on what we have called Bridgital solutions: Rather than aiming to replace human workers, these will look to interact with humans in ways that are mutually complementary. Many elements of context are inherently familiar to humans, but beyond the capacity of AI at this time; conversely, once a task has been structured and set up in a predictable manner, digital technologies are able to do the task quicker and more reliably than the average human.

  Combining these two capacities is at the heart of the Bridgital strategy, and will help design locally relevant and applicable solutions. In a country with a vast pool of job-seekers at every level of skill, and with the persistent gaps in access that we have examined, India should focus on how Bridgital combinations of data, connectivity and AI can be deployed to address its twin challenges. In the book, we describe this process of tech-innovation-led delivery as ‘scoring a hat-trick’: We will provide last-mile consumers with access to basic services at low cost, we will generate millions of jobs while doing so, and these jobs will prepare the workforce of the future for the workplace of the future.

  Talent

  India is a vast pool of untapped human resources. It hasn’t leveraged this resource as reliably or on the scale that it needs to. Beyond basic literacy and numeracy, India needs to design an education system based on five principles: digital skills; twenty-first-century skills (creativity, collaboration and critical thinking); new-age apprenticeships; lifelong learning; and entrepreneurial thinking.

  Digital skills are going to be a baseline expectation in the workplace of the future. Much as reading, writing and counting are taught as basic skills that underpin all other learning, today’s students must be trained in how to navigate the Internet and Fourth Industrial Revolution fields. The ability to seek out information using digital tools, to filter what one finds and identify what is most relevant to one’s purposes, and to adapt and apply that material to real-world questions will be central to all forms of learning and work hereafter.

  Building twenty-first-century skills is easier said than done. To dismiss these as ‘soft’ skills is a vast underestimation of the effort that goes into nurturing them. The good news is that these skills—such as creativity, collaboration and critical thinking—can be nurtured. The concepts can be introduced in early years and blended into other curricula; students can then be given opportunities to practise, all the way up to adolescence, with increasingly deliberate attention to the skill. Developing these skills means giving students the opportunity to experiment with real-world problems. Not only does this encourage contextual learning and application, but it also lets them experience failure—a key element in learning how to learn, test, iterate and persevere.

  Apprenticeships (broadly defined as structured learning-by-doing opportunities, typically under the supervision and guidance of a professional) are central to making the things one learns—including twenty-first-century skills—practical and relevant to the workplace. In addition to becoming familiar with a professional field and learning to apply one’s skills in that space, apprenticeships will also boost employability—especially if combined with a certification scheme that provides a credible signal to prospective employers about an apprentice’s practical training and abilities.

  The rapidly changing nature of both technology and work processes in the future workplace puts a premium on lifelong learning. To take advantage of the latest advancements, and to explore new fields as they open, people will have to regularly and systematically devote time and effort to upgrading their skills. In a labour market with a large number of job-seekers, it is neither efficient nor fair to place the burden of this task solely on individuals; rather, India has to think about expanding its education system in ways that will support workers and employers by offering opportunities for lifelong learning.

  Finally, India will have to nurture the attitudinal aspects of entrepreneurship. An entrepreneurial mindset—the willingness to take on risks, and the skills to assess these risks and opportunities wisely—has never been a priority in education. For all the recent changes in examination and retention policies, failure is still a stigma.

  The education system is designed for the industrial age: A nineteenth-century apparatus that India expects will create twenty-first-century problem-solvers. India must change this to a system that provides the scaffolding for skills a future workforce will require, with opportunities for learning, unlearning and relearning at every age and stage of professional life.

  Designing pathways to productive work for both women and men will be necessary. Only by transforming how India thinks about human capacity and talent can it establish itself as a truly smart nation.

  Vision

  As if India’s existing challenges were not enough, it also has to confront the increasingly rapid pace of change. This is a global trend; India is yet to experience its full impact, partly because infrastructure and connectivity vary to such a great extent across the country. None of us can precisely predict the tipping point. Once it takes off, tech-driven disruption will unfold at an exponential rate. Countries, industries and companies that are unprepared will forever struggle to catch up.

  What can India do? India can anticipate this trajectory. It has already led the way for the world to reimagine ways of work once, during the transition from hardware to software. In that process, it has learned much about what it takes to integrate technology and humans, and create ever more resilient and effective workplaces. Now, India’s goal must be the seamless integration of human capacities, digital tools and AI.

  When electricity was first introduced into industrial processes, it required thousands, if not millions, of micro-innovations—people tinkering around the margins, finding new ways to apply this new power source to reshape their factories and industries. So too with computers: The process of computerizing work across everything from hospitals t
o banks to airlines required experimentation and adaptation.

  India can cultivate the same pioneering mindset when it comes to Bridgital technologies today. A given platform or stack has the potential to transform an industry, but it will be the imagination of the early adopters that determines how that potential is deployed.

  India will need to build bridges. It grapples with many ‘missing middles’ every day—the mid-skill jobs it isn’t creating; the secondary-educated women who aren’t in the workforce; the mid-sized firms that so few Indian start-ups grow into. India’s job is to build those middles: to build the bridges between talent and productive work, using technology and foresight.

  Reinvention is never easy. One must devise an entirely new way of working, without the reassurance that comes with replicating already existing best practices. This isn’t just about finding new applications for the technology: India needs to anticipate its impact as well—the risks and disruptions it can bring. Yet this is precisely how every previous transformation has played out, and it is this attitude of flexibility, courage and judicious risk-taking that will let India be on the forefront of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

  The fact is that the twin challenges will not fix themselves. Nor will India be able to address them at scale if it continues on its usual course. Jugaad, tweaks and tricks, can only take it so far.

  This is why Bridgital is the next big opportunity for India, and one it cannot afford to miss. It is the development that will let India unlock its vast pool of talent, and apply their capacities to addressing the most inextricable problems of these times. In putting these solutions in place, it is assured of a pipeline of twenty-first-century talent for decades ahead. The three strategies we describe in the book can harness the potential of both, technologies and talent, and use them to make life better for every Indian.

  Smart policy can play a role in each of the three transformations:

  Technology: The government can invest substantially in research and development, while also building a legal and regulatory ecosystem that encourages innovation, especially in the Bridgital field. India needs a wave of new entrepreneurs who can adapt technologies for its needs, and the government can provide them both the room and the incentives to experiment.

  Talent: The reimagining of India’s education system, from its current industrial focus to one that nurtures agile and digitally native problem-solvers, is the greatest investment any government can make for India’s future. Education reform will not be easy, given how large and entrenched the current system is—yet it could not be any more urgent.

  Vision: Any new vision of the workplace must emphasize flexibility, adaptability and mobility. This requires new policies and legal systems that can work with workers—protecting and supporting people as they explore careers through diagonal moves from one firm or industry to another.

  The sheer scope of India’s challenges means that there is room for everyone to work on addressing them. Public–private partnerships—and indeed, even reforms of public service delivery systems such as healthcare, education and the judiciary—are precisely how these innovations will be incorporated and institutionalized.

  If all of this sounds daunting, keep in mind that the scale and complexity of India’s challenges is itself an opportunity. Unlike a more developed but less populous or less diverse country, India has both the urgency and the human resources. When India does crack these challenges, the solutions it devises will be relevant to many other societies and countries.

  The future of work will be imagined, designed, tested, and made in India. We have all the tools, and we’ve already tested the waters.

  Let’s dive in.

  To share ideas and feedback on the themes in this book, write to bridgital@tata.com.

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Peter Diamandis, ‘Is Tech Unemployment Good or Bad?’, Forbes, 14 July 2014. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterdiamandis/2014/07/14/is-tech-unemployment-good-or-bad/#3159a9184eb7

  2. D.S. Brown Jr, ‘The Automobile Question [Letter to the Editor]’, The New York Times, 03 July 1899. Available at: https://nyti.ms/2ZbZeTW

  3. The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) is the current and developing environment in which disruptive technologies and trends such as the Internet of Things (IoT), robotics, virtual reality (VR), autonomous transport and artificial intelligence (AI) are changing the way we live and work. The term was coined by Klaus Schwab, Founder, World Economic Forum.

  The First Industrial Revolution, in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, involved a change from mostly agrarian societies to greater industrialization; the Second Industrial Revolution was driven by electricity and involved expansion of industries and mass production; and the Third Industrial Revolution involved the development of computers and IT since the middle of the twentieth century.

  4. Tim Dean, ‘The mind of Michio Kaku’, Cosmos Magazine, 21 July 2014. Available at: https://cosmosmagazine.com/social-sciences/mind-michio-kaku

  5. All figures sourced from ‘World Population Prospects – 2017 Revision’, UN DESA. Available at: https://www.un.org/development/desa/publications/graphic/wpp2017-global-population. The medium fertility variant was used for calculation of age-group-wise projections. For India, UN population growth rates were applied to the 2011 census population.

  There are multiple definitions of working-age population. We adopt the convention that people aged fifteen years and above are considered to be of working age. More detail can be found in ‘The Jobs Challenge’.

  6. Analysis by Tata Sons Private Limited (‘Tata Sons’) using data from ‘World Economic Outlook’, International Monetary Fund, 2019. Available at: https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO.GDP and GDP per capita statistics are expressed in 2018 US$. An exchange rate of ₹70 per US$ is used throughout the book.

  7. India’s diversity is legendary. In the words of economist Joan Robinson, ‘Whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true.’ Take languages alone: According to the Registrar General and Census Commissioner, more than 19,500 languages and dialects are spoken across the country, with 121 languages spoken by 10,000 or more people. Or consider demography: Some states in the southern part of India are aging faster than some countries in Europe, while in states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, fertility rates are over three children per woman. When it comes to politics, the country has over 1,800 state and national parties. Before the recent introduction of the Goods and Services Tax (GST), a commodity could be subject to as many as twenty-two different state taxes as it moved across state borders. Heterogeneity has implications for consumer markets as well. Tata Global Beverages sells thirty-five varieties of tea across the country; the flagship brand, Tata Tea Premium, alone has thirteen different blends customized for regional palates.

  8. Tata Sons analysis using data from the IMF and CEIC; ‘World Economic Outlook’, International Monetary Fund, 2019. Available at: https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO

  9. ‘Diversity Underlying Unity: The state of India’s states: 2018’, International Market Assessment Private Limited. Available at: https://www.ima-india.com/templates/imaindia/report_pdf/Diversity%20Underlying%20Unity.pdf

  10. Average firm size in India as of 2014 was 2.24. See ‘All India Report of Sixth Economic Census’, Central Statistics Office, Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, 2014. Available at: http://www.mospi.gov.in/all-india-report-sixth-economic-census

  11. Aadhaar is India’s massive biometric identification programme. The database is tapped about 20 million times a day for everything from direct government welfare transfers to opening bank accounts (which now takes just minutes to authenticate, among the fastest in the world).

  12. ‘National Family Health Survey (NFHS-4)’, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, 2015-16. Available at: http://rchiips.org/nfhs/NFHS-4Reports/India.pdf

  13. Tata Sons analysis using data from ‘World Economic Outlook’, International Monetary
Fund, 2019. Available at: https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO.GDP

  14. Dominic Wilson and Roopa Purushothaman, ‘Dreaming with BRICs: The Path to 2050’, Global Economics Paper No: 99, Goldman Sachs, 2003

  15. While India has made remarkable progress in reducing absolute poverty, a large part of its population still lives on less than $5 per day.

  16. ‘Annual Report Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) July 2017–June 2018’, Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MOSPI) and National Statistical Office (NSO), Government of India, May 2019. Available at: http://mospi.nic.in/sites/default/files/publication_reports/Annual%20Report%2C%20PLFS%202017-18_31052019.pdf

  This report is referred to as ‘PLFS 2017–18’ for the rest of the book.

  17. Dani Rodrik, ‘The Good Jobs Challenge’, Project Syndicate, 7 February, 2019. Available at: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/how-countries-can-create-middle-class-jobs-by-dani-rodrik-2019-02?barrier=accesspaylog

  18. Website of the Good Jobs Institute. Available at https://goodjobsinstitute.org/what-is-a-good-job/

  19. PLFS 2017–18.

  20. According to McKinsey Global Institute’s 2014 paper, ‘From Poverty to Empowerment: India’s imperative for jobs, growth and effective basic services’, people in India lack access to 46 per cent of the services they need to fulfil their requirements for an acceptable standard of living. These include healthcare, education, energy and water, and sanitation. Available at: https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/featured% 20insights/asia%20pacific/indias%20path%20from%20poverty%20to%20empowerment/from_poverty_to_empowerment_indias_imperative_for_jobs_growth_and_effective_basic_services_executive_summary.ashx