India looks very attractive from a seven to ten year horizon

Government has a huge role to play in driving innovation

Despite all the gloom and doom surrounding the Indian economy currently, Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and a Silicon Valley investor said that the country looks very attractive from a seven to ten year horizon. Infrastructure, health, education and energy are the four areas that Khosla has identified as holding a great potential.

Khosla, who started a technology product incubator in November last year called Khosla Labs is currently on a tour of the country. He was speaking at an industry forum on entrepreneurship organized by Nasscom along with Nandan Nilekani, co-founder of Infosys Ltd and currently the chairman of the UID authority of India.

“Yes, there is corruption and bureaucratic inefficiencies. But, most of the emerging countries go through such issues,” said Khosla. He added that the country has to find a way around these issues. While health and education can be addressed through technology, infrastructure will require private investment.

Both Khosla and Nilekani said that government’s ambitious project to give a unique identity to 1.2 billion residents of the country will spur several technology innovations around the UID or the Aadhaar eco-system. “There could be an entire Aadhaar based reputation system in the country,” said Nilekani. He added while increasing usage of the UID number could not only help in building a credit history of the country, it could also build a health or a skills record of residents.

There are around 400 million people with Aadhaar number and around 100 million have bank accounts, once more accounts are linked to Aadhaar, applications could be built where a person transfers money to another person using just the Aadhaar number. “There are various applications that can be built by embedding these things,” he said.

Khosla also said that technology enables to solve lots of issues around healthcare especially in a country like India where the doctor to patient ratio is very low. He said that in the future a Electrocardiography (EKG) would be possible to be carried out through a mobile phone in a very inexpensive way. “We are working on such solutions and similar innovations are possible for heart, mental illness diagnosis etc”

Nilekani added that government has a huge role to play in establishing a culture of innovation in the country. Several popular technological advancements of today such as the Global positioning system (GPS) were initially government projects which have now spurred huge technological and commerce eco-system around them now. “There is a huge interplay between public policy role and funding of innovation, countries that can get the balance right will do well,” he said.