India's industry leaders call for 2023 to be a year of the technology revolution

As India witnessed the launch of much-awaited 5G services in the last leg of 2022, the coming year is likely to see a fast rollout of its services leading to numerous opportunities for mass adoption. As per Industry leaders, the coming year will be a bedrock for future innovations across sectors and can prove to be a milestone year.

Jagdish Mitra, Chief Strategy Officer and Head of Growth of Tech Mahindra says, "Powered by India's promising growth roadmap, 2023 has the potential to provide the impetus required for India to become digitally ready and lead technological advancements for the rest of the world to follow. I believe in 2023, we will see significant progress in autonomous systems, 5G, and green technology, as well as a quantum leap in technological skilling to digital transformation-related skilling."

Roll out of 5G services also mean greater innovation and adoption of new-age technology as well. Anku Jain, Managing Director, MediaTek India says his company will expand 5G portfolio to 5G Thin Modem, redcap and wearables, automotive telematics and industrial M2M/IoT, and focus on emerging trends like Metaverse, Wi-Fi 7, and power management applications in Computing & Storage of the future. Whereas going beyond 5G Nokia India Spokesperson said "2023 is expected to witness wider adoption of private networks by enterprises and businesses for enhanced efficiency and security and further, we hope to support India's full and equal participation in the evolution of 6G standards in the next few years as our R&D engineers based here continue to contribute to the collaborative global effort."

With 5G becoming a great enabler for innovation and new models of connectivity for enterprises, companies involved in enterprise solutions believe next year can be a game changer. Rajiv Bhalla, Managing Director, India & Vice President APAC, at Barco says, "We foresee technologies like AL/ML, cloud computing, 5G, IoT and automation to drive sustainable solutions and new use cases across sectors, industries, governance and citizen services."

Rahul Tandon, Senior Vice President of IDEMIA India believes that as India ushers in 5G connectivity it opens up many new capabilities to enhance productivity and safety of not only online transactions but Machine2Machine (M2M) transactions as well. "The network technologies 5G, 5Gi, 4G and under Low power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) such as Narrow Band IoT (NB-IoT), LTE-M, Long Range Radio (LoRa), ZigBee and SigFox are creating new business opportunities around these technologies. Indeed, the magical combination of these technologies will change the contours of connectivity, security and analytics."

Adding another dimension of enterprise connectivity, Agendra Kumar, MD, Esri India comments, "Moving ahead, technology trends like the integration of various types of data in GIS systems, data portals to enable easy sharing of data, and Geo-Hubs to create more collaborative working environments and increase community engagement, are going to transform the way geospatial technologies are being consumed."

With such a transformational year ahead, this will mean a new approach and the creation of suitable manpower. Arvind Bali, CEO of Telecom Sector Skill Council says, "Over the next three years, we will be training over 100,000 youth in these technologies and many more. We plan to add 10 CoEs and the 100,000 training is being done with DoT oversight. We are going to add 100 new courses to our roster for use cases in both legacy and new technologies. The rollout of 5G will help accelerate advancement in skilling and telecom."

With the expansion of technology dimensions, the Indian government has put a lot of focus on creating technology and products within the country and it is showing results on ground A. Gururaj, Managing Director of Optiemus Electronics, a homegrown electronics manufacturer which is on an expansion mode says, "We are actively expanding our capabilities in 5G telecom equipment and have partnered with leading companies to supply 5G products. We also aim to strengthen the IT Hardware segment by expanding laptop manufacturing and starting new categories like mini pc, etc. Adding on to that, we have plans to enter emerging categories like IoT and EV as India adopts new technologies. Optiemus is all set to open its 3rd state-of-the-art manufacturing facility in Noida with a capacity for high-volume manufacturing."

With a lot going in for transforming India's technology landscape, 2023 can be a rewarding year for the tech industry and its consumers in India.

• Business