Caselet of India Vision 2035: Healthcare

Jamuna Tudu was wearing the bio-sensor vest as she was overseeing her agricultural patch in Armo in Jharkhand. Jamuna was expecting and so the monitoring vest given to her by the PHC at Bermo. She was thinking about names to keep for the baby when she got a call from the Centralized Health Monitoring System that informed her that her vitals indicated she will be delivering soon and should move to the PHC. Her nominated ASHA worker and family also received a similar call, thanks to the AI system that was monitoring over 100 m expectant mothers and senior citizens on a continuous real-time basis, over a complex 7G mobile and satellite system. By the time she reached the local PHC, she received request for consent for the PHC doctors to access her medical records that were stored in the national health system. Her verbal consent over the phone ensured that the PHC was ready with all the medical information required to aid her in her delivery. It turned out that Jamuna had a special condition for which the Medical AI system recommended an expert opinion from Dr. Aleem, who was based out of Dhaka. 

Dr. Aleem specialized in the genotypes of the sub-population that Jamuna came from. Thanks to the trans-national medical interchange system built, it took a few minutes for Dr. Aleem to get into the records of Jamuna to provide his expert opinion on the medical situation. It turned out that Dr. Aleem would have to do an immediate procedure on Jamuna, which he immediately initiated using the remote robotic systems that allowed him to control the robotic surgeon at the PHC at Bermo. Thanks to the IT standards that have been agreed upon between the south Asian countries, it was seamless for Dr. Aleem to do the remote robotic procedure from Dhaka. 

The day ended with Jamuna being a proud mother of a healthy baby. 

Needless to say, the local school systems were automatically informed of a child who will join their school in four years’ time. In the meantime, Jamuna continued to get regular reminders for her child’s inoculation from the Central health System as part of the Cognitive Nation initiative.

Caselet of India Vision 2035: Blue Collared worker

Hargovind had taken up vocational training early in his career and took pride in being a blue-collared worked. He especially liked cleaning the drains of Delhi. So on new year day in 2035, he got up late to go for work and the city systems informed him of potential drain clogs detected. He did a quick visual inspection of the drains in the NDMC area using the built-in cameras and notices that the revelers of previous night and thrown in paper plates and paper spoons into the drains, with possibility of clogging them. Hargovind eased himself into his chair and remotely activated the mechanical cleaning “snake” that would slither into the drains and start cleaning up the material that would clog them. As the “mechanical snake” pumped out the bio-degradable clogging material from the drains, it got ferried straight into the micro-STP nearby which would convert the material into cooking gas for the nearby restaurants and into fertilizers for the NDMC maintained parks.

Hargovind thanked the prescient government for setting up the technical orchestration that helped cameras, sensors, robots and communication technologies to help him accomplish his job without getting into the drain as his predecessors would do.

India Vision 2035: White-collar Workspace

                           Caselets of how India should be in Year 2035

In 2035, India and the world would have fast moved into the gig economy playing a considerable role. So when Nazia, a digital supply chain expert, got a mandate from a leading FMCG company to re-design their hybrid supply chain within the next 2 months, she quickly put together the details of the kind the people she would need to deliver on the project. She then opened up a project in one of her preferred online systems which in turn was linked to the national human resource database, that was hosted by the government. 

In the next 10 minutes, with the help of AI-aided systems, she could identify the right set of people who will join her project, fix their rates and schedule the project workplan. Nazia was able to finish off her project within the 2 months with a team of 7 people whom she never met face to face, and was aided by the online systems, processes and open data available from private sector, institutions and the government, including anonymous taxation data, that helped her design an extremely optimized supply chain for her client. 

Her system would contribute to increasing the efficiency of the national economy.

India Vision 2035: Vision Ease of Living

Caselets of how India should be in Year 2035

After a night of celebrations on 31st Dec 2034, Aayush was scheduled to fly early morning from New Delhi to Bengaluru at 7:00 AM. He was reluctant to wake up early and was not sure if the flight will be on time due to weather conditions. He went off to sleep instructing his phone to wake him in time to catch the flight. As the case was, the flight did get delayed by 2 hours due to weather conditions and Ayush’s phone connected to the national flight system to get the information of the delay. So the phone woke up Ashish 2 hours later. The phone also plugged into the realtime city road congestion system and figured out that there is very little traffic in the city, as was expected on a new year day, and so automatically ordered for an autonomous cab to ferry Ayush from his home to the nearest metro, for Ayush to catch his flight on time.

Ayush was able to optimize his time and increase productivity while have a better quality of life by using the systems of a Cognitive Nation and a India Middleware.

The Issue of Internet Governance

The Internet is a critical socio-economic enabler, which has deep impact on the economy, social order, law and order and the fabric of the nation itself. Its impact is only going to amplify as we move forward, especially when things start getting connected to each other and when the next generation of the Internet, IPV6 enabled Internet, starts getting rolled out. It would imply that your automobile can get connected to the cloud computing facility of the manufacturer for automatic analytics of the health of the automobile.

As per some estimates (refer note on Internet Governance at IIGF, New Delhi), the number of Internet-connected devices globally crossed 6 billion in 2011, and is expected to reach 15 billion, twice the size of the world’s population, before 2016. More than 6 billion mobile phone subscriptions are in use today, and the number is expected to cross 8 billion by 2016.  Mobile data traffic reached 597 petabytes in 2011, twice the amount of 2010, and is estimated to cross 10 exabytes by 2016. Broadband subscribers, estimated at 1 billion in 2011, are forecast to grow at 40% per annum, and reach 3.5 billion in 2016. As a large part of the growth is to take place in the developing countries of Asia, India can be expected to be a major component and beneficiary of this growth trajectory.      

The Internet started as a means of sharing information amongst scientist working in different institutions. From that, it is becoming – if not already become --the communications backbone of the world. It is a major economic driver, provides banking and other financial services to world’s business, provides a global market place and is replacing the conventional print and visual media. Internet is now ubiquitous in today’s world. Cutting off an enterprise or a country from the internet would have severe consequences.

This of course immediately also brings out the dangers that are emerging in such an interconnected world. The Internet can be used to bring down the telecommunications network of different countries, its banks and even its’ power grid. In Iran, we have seen the use of cyber weapons by the US and Israel taking out physically 10,000 centrifuges. If this had been done using a missile, it would have been considered an act of war. How should we then look at the Internet – also as a strategic space which then country’s need to protect? (ref. http://newsclick.in/india/internet-governance-and-itu-issues-baku-and-dubai by Prabir Purkayastha)

Therefore, a clear governance structure for the Internet, that is aligned to the long-term growth of the Internet and that is aligned to the interests of the economy and national security, is necessary for a healthy socio-economic functioning of a modern economy.

Internet Governance includes, but is not limited to, the following key issues:

[I] infrastructure and management of critical internet resources, including administration of the domain name system and Internet protocol addresses, administration of the root server system, technical standards, network neutrality, and multilingualisation; 

[ii] issues in the use of the Internet, including spam, network security and cybercrime; 

[iii] issues of wider impact such as Intellectual Property Rights [IPRs], freedom of expression, data protection and privacy rights, consumer rights and International Trade; and, 

[iv] developmental aspects, in particular, capacity-building.

From a socio-economic perspective, it impacts issues such as sovereignty over the Internet/ Free usage of Internet and interconnects, issues of Transborder data exchange and therefore its impact on Cloud Computing, issues of Data protection, the freedom of Internet, privacy, cyberwarfare and the issue of  global ban on use of Cyberweapons and cybersecurity.

Under the existing system of Internet governance, the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers [ICANN] performs two principal functions:

(a)  The Internet Assigned Names Authority [IANA] function whereby it controls entries to the authoritative Root Zone File of the Internet

(b)  The management of the Domain Name System [DNS] and the allocation of Top Level Domain [TLD] names. 

The function of allocation of TLD has been recently renewed as a perpetual contract, known as the Affirmation of Commitments between ICANN and the US Government. The IANA function has also been renewed for a seven-year period beginning 01 October 2012. The IANA function is overseen by the National Telecommunication and Information Administration under the US Department of Commerce. Technical standards are set by the Internet Engineering Task Force [IETF]. The central elements of the Internet's logical infrastructure, also called Critical Internet Resources, thus continue to be managed by private entities such as ICANN and IANA under contractual arrangements with the US Government (refer note on Internet Governance at IIGF, New Delhi.)

The United Nations established the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in 2005 to discuss the issues of Global Internet Governance. However, UN/IGF does not have the organisational structure or the mandate to agree on decisions and the enforcement mechanism to implement them.

There is therefore an urgent need to bring in participation by Governments, especially from the developing countries, in order to establish a multilateral, transparent and democratic Internet governance mechanism that functions with the full involvement of Governments, the private sector, civil society and international organizations, without according a pre-eminent role to any single Government or organization. Government of India is hence rightly formulating the policies for engaging in the reforms process required for a global participative Internet Governance structure.

The Concept of Critical Digital Infrastructure

Digital is having an increasing impact on the three aspects of national security – (a) internal security, (b) external security and (c) personal security

India has faced a series of internal security challenges that has emanated from the digital world. Such challenges include spreading of rumours that led to significant law and order situations that led to lynching and death of many. Digital has the power to spread misinformation in an explosive manner, and in very short period of time. Digital also has the ability to bring down Critical Information Infrastructure.

However, more importantly, we have reached a stage where many digital services such as mapping, social media, e-commerce etc have become digital utilities which, if affected, can lead to loss of jobs and disruption in the economy. Imagine if Google maps is suddenly withdrawn from India. It will impact the app based cab industry and would render millions jobless. Similarly, if WhatsApp stops working, it will disrupt many business models and impact normal day to day life.

Hence, we can safely label such digital utilities as Critical Digital Infrastructure, which needs to be protected. 

Unfortunately, in India, much of the Critical Digital Infrastructure, is not under the control of Indian entities and under limited control of the Indian government.   

My views on budget expectations on India Today TV

https://www.indiatoday.in/budget-2019/video/great-expectations-can-union-budget-fix-the-economy-1554234-2019-06-22