Bengaluru: Value-based technology is slowly revolutionising the world and India, mostly Bengaluru, has the largest pool of experts who endorse this school of thought, Sharad Sharma from a technology think tank said at a summit in the city on Saturday.
Sharma cited the case of India-made MOSIP (Modular Open Source Identity Platform), designed to help governments roll out digital ID solutions for citizens in a cost-effective way. About 100 million people in 11 countries have registered on MOSIP-based systems and Sharma believes its adoption will rise to a billion in another 18 months.
“It is the largest export of any software from India. It (MOSIP) is anchored in the International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore,” iSPIRT Foundation’s cofounder said during ‘Ethics of disruptive technologies’, the opening panel discussion of the science and technology policy summit Dialogue 2023, hosted by the office of the principal scientific adviser to the union government and IISc, Bengaluru.
Given that value-based technology is for the public good, it is poised to be “permissive in some areas and restrictive in some areas”, Sharma said, explaining why regulatory frameworks are required to steer disruptive technologies. This paradigm is in sharp contrast to how, for instance, nuclear technology was managed about 70 years ago, “when technologists were free to create whatever they wanted”.
However, regulation should not stifle growth, Ajay Kumar Sood, principal scientific adviser to the government of India, remarked in his keynote address.
Emphasising that the development of science is linked to national development, he added that the Centre has formed a high-powered committee to consider the ethical and operational challenges of tech-led public projects it has chalked out. “Quantum tech will impact our lives in less than five years,” Sood singled out. While quantum technology will turbocharge everything from computation to communications, it is also seen as a risk to cybersecurity systems.
Expanding science and technology horizon was the theme of the summit and Sood went on to illustrate how India is faring on that front. He said India has achieved 30% economic growth, increased efficiency in public sector, and opened new markets because of its Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) platforms such as Aadhaar, eKYC, UPI and DigiLocker. As of September 2023, Aadhaar enrolment stood at 1.37 billion, and UPI recorded a transaction count of 10.58 billion in August 2023.
The speakers agreed that dialogue and collaboration with stakeholders cutting across government bodies, academia, industries and civil society is key to framing and deploying tech for good. Similarly, cooperation and trust among countries are needed to share tech knowledge and mitigate associated risks keeping aside their politics and competition, another panel discussed. Abhishek Singh, Additional Secretary, Ministry of Electronics and IT, gave the example of US chipmaker Micron Technology, which is setting up a manufacturing plant in Gujarat.