350-550 million Indians to join mobile internet in four years: McKinsey

Digital India in the next 10 years will have a $550 billion to $1 trillion impact on the GDP resulting from the use of intelligent applications of technology. This is 20-30 per cent of India’s incremental GDP growth and 3-6 times the current economic contribution of the industry itself, according to Noshir Kaka, Managing Director, India, McKinsey & Company.

In the next four years, there will be a dramatic change in technology in India with the largest migration in mankind’s history after the invention of the Internet taking place with humans attaching themselves to the internet. It is expected that 350-550 million people will join the mobile internet in the next four years.

This is a huge shift, and that’s why the Centre is putting Digital India as the centrepiece, he said at the inaugural session of the annual convention of the Madras Management Association on the theme India 2015 – The Year of Resurgence.

The scale of opportunity will come mainly from sectors like financial services, which will be the largest, followed by education, healthcare, agriculture, food, energy, infrastructure and government services.

“This is the opportunity for all of us if we use technology intelligently. It is not about using complex technology for algorithms but use of simple technology for India today,” he said.

“We cannot solve problems of India today without aggressively leveraging technology. We have the technology and the capability, and need to leverage what we do with it for the rest of the world, for India. My belief is that resurgence should never lie only with the government, which is only an enabler. We will see people will be retrained and new technology will emerge for India, and from India. We will see a huge theme around innovation that will lead to huge growth,” he said.

The impact technologies are going to have on the industries like manufacturing, financial services, government, energy and agriculture is expected to be between $16 trillion and $39 trillion in the next 10 years.

Kaka said about 30 per cent of the work done by knowledge workers today is not likely to be done by humans anymore. In other words, in the next 10 years machines will do 30 per cent of the work that humans do today, he said.

The Indian IT services in the first 20 years of its existence added one person for every dollar added. It is now down to 0.5 and for the next $100 billion that this industry is going to add, “we are going to take one-third of the people that we historically needed”, he said.

“In India, we will have an opportunity because as technology takes away jobs, it also creates new jobs of 14-28 million that did not exist in the past mainly from non-farm sectors,” he said.