Gearing the momentum to achieve the mission of a 5 Trillion Dollar economy

S Mohini Ratna, Editor, VARINDIA
 

India is among the three largest economies in terms of number of digital consumers in the world. India's Trillion Dollar Digital Opportunity has the potential to quintuple its digital economy by 2025. Towards this, everyday transactions have become digital as evidenced by the meteoric rise of UPI and digital wallets.

PM Narendra Modi has aimed for a 5 trillion-dollar economy by 2024. To attain this target, our GDP needs to grow steadily over the next few years. Digital technology has become a vital factor in accelerating the pace of India’s economic growth as India is striving to become one of the early adopters of 5G technology, and its induction is expected to multiply possibilities and opportunities across the spectrum in ways that we cannot fathom now.

A large part of the next billion users are first-time users of computing technology like smartphones. They are not familiar with the dos and don’ts of the Internet and it will be up to the digital interfaces to help protect them against fraud online. Another group at risk are senior citizens whose world worked very differently for them but there is a need to make digital interface much simpler and easy to understand for them.

The Government recognised the importance of promoting growth in services sectors and provides several incentives in a wide variety of sectors, which is not only the dominant sector in India’s GDP, but has also attracted significant foreign investment flows, contributing significantly to exports as well as providing large-scale employment. Similarly, the Indian mobile economy and telecommunication market is growing rapidly and will contribute substantially which has witnessed a 165 per cent growth in app downloads in the past two years and a total subscriber base of 1,183.51 million at the end of March 2019.Moreover, the Digital India will be a programme under which all the sectors such as healthcare, retail, etc. will be connected through internet.

A survey says that a gig economy is becoming a key part of India Inc’s strategy and most of the professional gig economy segments have seen a double digit growth in the next two years. Start-ups were early adopters of flexible talent and now large corporates are driving the demand by leveraging independent consultant services and freelancers to pilot new product/service models.

Technology has the potential to disrupt our existing and future infrastructure and it is reshaping the national infrastructure requirements. Disruptive technology innovation in infrastructure has the potential to alter both demand and supply dynamics. It has the potential to drive efficiencies and in some cases make existing infrastructure obsolete. These new technologies threaten to disrupt the entire business and regulatory models of whole sectors, resulting in increasing consumption of IT hardware, software products and solutions. Hence, it is crucial for everyone to play the role in proactively driving the technology agenda.
India is the fastest growing market for the E-Commerce sector. Revenue from the sector is expected to touch US$ 100 billion by the next year 2021, growing at an annual rate of 50 per cent, the highest in the world. There has been a national wide protest, to ensure that all kinds of malpractices including predatory pricing, deep discounts and loss funding done by the domestic and global E- Commerce companies operating in India are stopped. Hope, the Government is going to regulate the e-commerce companies in India so that the Brick and Mortar shops could survive, which are the driving forceof  the Indian economy. This could help in curtailing non-competitive practices, increased participation of MSMEs and thus survival and growth of the small retailers in India. Policies and legislation to protect Indian interests in the digital economy could be prioritised. The fact is Brick-and-mortar stores will thrive alongside online. It is high time for the firms to move away from the traditional distributor-led system to one with multiple partners at an omni-channel module.

The September Anniversary Issue is talking about the annual Channel Leadership Survey (CLS) that brings out a blueprint on how the technology vendors are performing in the price sensitive market in India, being voted by their channel partners.

We thank you very much for your regular support and contributions from the last 20 years of our journey and the recent success of the Anniversary Issue is a testimony to our commitment.

Finally, I would like to thank you, the contributors and readers of VARINDIA, for your interests both in the Print & Digital editions, and I encourage you to continue sending us your invaluable feedback and ideas for further improvement of our Publication.