“Digital is the new mantra for growth and building resilient infrastructure, human centric technologies is the need of the hour”, says Dr. V K Saraswat 

New Delhi: Emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, 5G, and 3D printing will change the infrastructure landscape and provide inclusive solutions for economic recovery post Covid-19, said Dr. V K Saraswat, Member, NITI Aayog, Government of India, at the International Digital Conference and Exhibition on ‘COVID-19: Emerging Technologies for Industrial and Societal Resilience and Growth: “Action, Preparedness, and Future Strategy’ organized by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) today.

Dr. Saraswat acknowledged that the present crisis has brought forth phenomenal capabilities of our industrial R&D and start-up system in creating solutions and re-shaping our health infrastructure.

He further expressed that this crisis has posed fresh challenges on demand side especially in the tourism, hospitality, aviation sectors and financial market and on the supply side by liquidity crunch, manpower shortages, supply chain etc. He further emphasized that we have to significantly revamp the infrastructure to reboot the economy and perseverance and endurance would be the key elements to this.

He also stated that transition to e-health, e-learning and e-mobility should be focussed on for post Covid era with innovation and emerging technologies seamlessly integrated in systems.

Dr. Saraswat laid important emphasis on quantum technologies and building industry capabilities, government readiness and adoption of the society for quantum technologies that hold great potential across diverse sectors. He stated the need to promote quantum workforces in defence, navigation, healthcare and communication sectors.

He concluded by saying that science and technology will play a major role in developing a futuristic and integrated and resilient economy.

Prof. Subra Suresh, President, Nanyang Technological University Singapore shared his insights on the positive and negative lessons taught by Covid 19 to the global community and particularly India. He further mentioned that Covid 19 has led India to leapfrog technologies like never before and realize the implementation and execution of cutting-edge technologies. He further stated that digitization in all sectors including education, healthcare, manufacturing etc. can lead to powerful positive change with the creation of new intellectual, pedagogical models that will eventually improve the lives and livelihood of citizens.

In his address at the Inaugural Session, Mr. Kiran Karnik, Chairman, CII National Committee on Telecom & Broadband stated that emerging technologies like data analytics an artificial intelligence play a tremendous role in testing, tracing and tracking in this unprecedented crisis. He further emphasized that higher bandwidth, highly reliable networks, new technologies like 5G, IoT, data processing and combination of these technologies with human interventions will be the world of tomorrow.

In his speech at the Inaugural session, Mr. C P Gurnani, Managing Director and CEO, Tech Mahindra stressed that the focus on research, design and manufacturing across technologies like 4G, 5G etc. would help India progress towards the ‘Atma-nirbhar’ mission. He further emphasized that emerging technologies have a great potential to help India not only fight Covid but also re-build the technological prowess.

Mr. Rajan Navani, Chairman, CII India@75 Council and Vice Chairman and Managing Director, Jetline Group of Companies highlighted that building trust is very critical and the emerging technologies can play a very significant role in this direction thereby creating opportunities in short, medium and long term.

While setting the context, Mr. Anant Maheshwari, Chairman, CII National Committee on IT-ITeS and President, Microsoft India discussed in detail about 3Rs – Response, Recovery ad Re-imagination as the three phases in response to Covid crisis. He further emphasized that remote everything is becoming the new normal and digital transformation and emerging technologies will be integral to this.

In the unprecedented Covid crisis, emerging technologies will pave the way for new techniques of functioning with digitally enabled automation, AI, IoT, and Industry 4.0 as the new normal. Parallelly, an urgent need to strengthen our digital infrastructure was also highlighted to encourage new methods of working remotely, online/digital education, training/skilling/digital payments/transactions, online healthcare and other critical requirements like remote monitoring of assets.

Organized by CII, the event saw Indian and global luminaries discuss the role of emerging technologies across diversified sectors to boost productivity and create new opportunities to galvanize the growth across fields including manufacturing, education, healthcare, retail, security etc. The event was hosted on CII HIVE, its dedicated multi-feature, virtual online exhibition and conferencing platform with 24X7 helpdesk with a digital B2B lounge. The event also featured a digital exposition of emerging and new -age technologies by industries.