'India expected to be in prominent position in designing, manufacturing digital products'

India is expected to be in a prominent position in designing and manufacturing digital products and catering to the world markets moving forward, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (Meity) Secretary Ajay Prakash Sawhney said here on Wednesday.

Speaking at a session on "Ahead in the Cloud" during the ongoing TiE Global Summit (TGS) being held online, he said Software as a service (SaaS ) would happen significantly from India and would be fuelled by cloud-based services.

"We are also supported by a huge momentum today in rebuilding our electronics ecosystem.

"I expect that as we move forward it will not just be software products, it will be digital products that get designed, get manufactured in India and serve not only the huge Indian market, but are designed to serve across the borders and serve everywhere else...that's the hope that we are looking at," he said.

The official said the Aarogya Setu mobile application was developed in 21 days backed by cloud infrastructure, and it took about four months and 10 days for it to get to 150 million downloads.

Sawhney opined that this simply would not have been possible without cloud infrastructure and the kind of the services and kind of accessibility the nation has. The kind of talent that came together and made it happen was a scratch team of about 15 people from the industry and another four or five joining in from the government.

It took them just 21 days to create this kind of an app that could hit such amazing numbers, which was a pointer to the talent, he said

"I can tell you that I can find 10,000 such teams in India no different from the team that (developed) Aarogya Setu."

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"That is the talent that exists here and the opportunities that are getting created with data and Artificial Intelligence (AI).. we are about to come out with the implementation plan for AI--the national programme on AI," Sawhney said.

Major companies in the country are recognising the need for skilling of their staff and building competencies in advanced data analytics, AI, and blockchain, for cloud computing, cloud services, and cybersecurity among others, he said.

The industry had come together and NASSCOM had helped create a platform for upskilling and reskilling large numbers of persons working with those companies, he said.

"I am upbeat about the skilling and availability of talent, in fact so much so, that we characterise India the way Israel characterises itself as a startup nation. I think we must characterise India as a Digital Talent Nation. That has been our strength all along and that continues to be our strength and we are very cognisant of it... We are determined to make sure that the right human resource is always available," Ajay said.