The 4IRs of progress

Book review of 'Kranti Nation: India and the Fourth Industrial Revolution'

Kranti Nation

India and the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Pranjul Sharma

Macmillan; 288 pages; Rs 599

Pranjul Sharma’s opening assertion seems out of sync with reality. “Revolutions are not new to India,” he writes. “Revolutions” are big-bang systemic change, often accompanied by violence. This is foreign to India. We have “revolted” often enough, against incumbent sovereigns. But accretion is more our style — changes in elites, grafted onto a near static, hierarchical, social, political, and economic architecture. 

Nor is the “nation” a useful level of aggregation to study the process that goes by the moniker, of the “fourth industrial revolution” (4IR). The very concept of sovereign nations is under threat from 4IR. Consider bitcoin, a 4IR virtual reality that fatally undermines the sovereign’s right to control money supply. Bitcoin decentralises management to the set of miners and owners of the digital asset whilst the program itself regulates how many bitcoins can be mined.

Consider also the inversion of traditional scale economies by 3D printing, which promotes decentralised production.

But such diversions into the philosophical dimensions of 4IR are not the author’s concern. Mr Sharma states upfront that this book is a chronicle of how Indian businesses have adapted to the universally accepted irreversibility of 4IR. Information gleaned from interviews is arranged anecdotally across 10 chapters — services, being the most weighty in India’s value creation, are dealt with across seven chapters, versus two for manufacturing, and one for agriculture.

In services, the unique identity programme of Aadhaar, bolstered by financial inclusion via mobile banking and payment transactions, deserves top billing. Both interventions ride on the scale impact of connectedness, which is one of the attributes of 4IR.

In comparison, 4IR in health services is less pervasive. Google partners Sankara Eye Hospital, Bengaluru, and the Aravind Eye Hospitals group, Tamil Nadu, to localise machine learning for accurate, early detection of diabetic retinopathy — a major cause for blindness. Bengaluru-based SigTuple, a start-up, founded in 2015, applies artificial intelligence to improve analysis and reduce the time required for imaging-based health diagnostics — blood and semen smears and chest x-rays. 

The absence of quality teachers, amidst burgeoning numbers of students, is expected to boost the Indian market for online education to 10 million by 2021, up from around 2 million today. Gurugram-based Educomp has 20,000 modules of online, digital, multi-lingual educational material. Others, such as Pune-based Skills Alpha, meet the demand for online re-skilling, so relevant, in the context of expected job losses from 4IR. Naukri.com uses artificial intelligence to place applicants in appropriate jobs. NIIT, which started in 1982 by making computers familiar to non-engineers, has now diversified into data analytics for business and learning purposes.

Expectedly, the logistics segment is focused on automating warehousing using robots. Telecom leads in using the Internet of Things (IoT). Airtel provides smart metering solutions for electricity utilities; equipment monitoring for industry and traffic management solutions to municipalities. Mumbai-based, Writer Corporation, established in 1947, as a packing company, now provides solutions for digital storage and online retrieval of the digital documents of banks and finance companies.

Phillips has partnered Naya Raipur Development Authority to digitise the management of street lights through a smart, web-based, “add on” solution to existing equipment — a forward-looking initiative in a grossly underdeveloped Chhattisgarh. Myntra, the popular e-commerce fashion retailer used artificial intelligence to enhance productivity of the design shop by an astronomical 100 times and reduce the time taken for introducing new designs by 90 percent. Autumn Worldwide is a marketing agency that “listens” digitally to social media to identify product development and behavioral trends. This enables them to supply tailored marketing and outreach solutions. Delhi-based i2e1 collects masses of consumer behaviour data by offering free Wi-Fi hotspots at tea shops and restaurants. It uses this data to refine its algorithm predicting customer response to product traits. Nielson uses neuroscience and medical metrics such as heart rate and eye movement to measure a customer’s emotive response to advertising stimuli in its Mumbai-based laboratory. This helps it devise advertising strategies more effectively.

Bajaj Finserv is the first to vary vehicle insurance premia by using telematics to assess driver behaviour. This provides an incentive for responsible driving, much needed on our accident-prone highways.

In agriculture, Aibobo, a Kerala start-up, uses big data analytics to bring renewed hope, for small farmers. It lowered the high initial cost of digitised solutions by virtual aggregation of 200 small farms into an economically viable size. Using cloud services, it provides precise agricultural advice to individual farmers — soil analysis, irrigation alerts, advice on sowing, planting, harvesting and sale. The plan is to extend it to 500 small farmers in the Nilgiris.

The author provides a rich tapestry of anecdotes. These vary in scope and style. This has probably limited the adoption of a standardised format to present the key lessons. The lay reader will also miss a glossary explaining the technical jargon and a sector-wise contact list of 4IR stars.

But writers work within the constraints of the available information. Mr Sharma should rest assured that, his son, Aadi, will be proud of how his dad maximised learning by optimising the sharing of information and analysing it.