I was recently asked to speak about a developed India by 2047, the role technology will play, and the challenges the bureaucracy would face in attaining the goal. I believe that the concept of being ‘developed’ should be considered as a milestone reached before moving the goalpost further ahead. There is no space for complacency. Resting on one’s laurels and not moving forward is the same as stagnation leading to decline. There are innumerable examples of individuals, communities, civilisations, corporations, or countries, who considered themselves ‘developed’ only to be lost in the pages of history. 

Technology has played a major role in faster development. Textiles and steel industries were developed in the country before independence. Manufacturing got an impetus as governments invested in setting up plants across different sectors. I could not appreciate the role of technology in our growth during my growing up years. However, I witnessed events after I started working that made me understand the benefits of technology in daily life. I will narrate a few of these. I joined railway services in East India in the early eighties. I remember the serpentine queues of people during the holiday rush, waiting patiently outside the railway reservation offices in Calcutta much before the opening hour, only to be disappointed as the booking windows were closed without the people having moved much. Human errors also played foul. My uncle missed his train back home after my wedding. The clerk had mistakenly reserved his ticket on the train a day before. The official tried to brazen it out blaming us for the wrong entry in the reservation form. Computerised reservations across diverse fields, available even on our mobiles, have pervaded our lives to such an extent that there is hardly any activity where we now need to stand in queues.

Telephone is another area. We did not have telephone call facilities in our homes. I was engaged to be married in the mid-eighties. It was a long-distance courtship spread over five months with my wife in college in Delhi. I was in Calcutta. There were no telephones available to me nearby to make a call. I went to Japan for training in the early nineties. I stayed in a hostel that had an international call facility. The day calls were exorbitantly expensive.

All of us would wait until late at night when the charges were relatively affordable. I was posted in a railway township, Chittaranjan, located on the borders of Bihar and Bengal. We needed to travel 25 km in either of the two states to access phones in the grocery shops to talk to our parents. This was to change within a few years with the advent of yellow booths called Public Call Offices (PCOs) even in small villages. This was just the beginning.

We caught up or even surpassed the world in mobile telephony. The world had shrunk. Despite the flipside of the most modern WhatsApp which is often used to spew venom, one can conveniently reach out to near and dear ones from anywhere and anytime.

There was a time when one had to spend long hours in the cramped bank halls to withdraw money. ATMs, already available in several other countries since much earlier, were a welcome change. Then came the cashless economy or banking through mobile applications. I was pleasantly surprised when I could buy a small packet of snacks or a cup of tea in a small mountain village by scanning the code displayed at the counter. Innumerable aspects of daily life have undergone a technological revolution for the better. A life made easier still has challenges for the legislature and the bureaucracy. The biggest of these for a country with a population of 1.4 Billion is to communicate with everyone. The child performing by the roadside for that small extra money for the family cannot fathom if its life is improving. The role of the executive does not end with the issue of a few circulars. Inclusive growth needs much better communication methods than town criers in the village squares. We should always remain a work in progress. We must compete with ourselves to keep moving from one benchmark to the next. Better and faster technology should be exploited to serve, not to enslave us. Everyone should feel included in this exciting journey. Then, nothing can stop us.

(The author is an electrical engineer with the Indian Railways and conducts classes in creative writing. Views expressed are personal)