5. The technology revolution
Talking of technology, another development that had catapulted India and helped it leap-frog several decades, Nilekani said, "What people don't realize is it has played as much a role in India's internal development as it has in terms of the $50 billion in IT (information technology exports)."
"For example, India's entire national election was held on electoral voting machines. You are talking about a million voting machines all over the country and the entire national elections of 2004 across the length and breadth of the country were done digitally using electronic voting machines -- there was no paper."
Nilekani said "this is a classic case of how you use technology to leap-frog and go from a very antiquated system to a very modern system."
He also cited the example of the stock-market and said that in the 1990s, "India had among the most antiquated stock-markets in the world. It took months to settle transactions, there was a lot of fraud, lots of duplicate work, a lot of embezzlement and so forth. Today, thanks to technology, India has the most modern stock markets in the world and they are completely electronic."
Nilekani said a veritable no-brainer vis-ŕ-vis the technology revolution that had propelled India was the mobile phone. "It has become accessible to everybody. It is touching and feeling every individual and we are seeing more and more applications, which have a huge impact and the good thing about these applications is that they cause a quantum leap in productivity -- it goes up by a huge amount and much of this is what has fuelled the economic growth."
Image: Indian election officials check electronic voting machines at Agartala, capital of Tripura. | Photograph: STRDEL/AFP/Getty Images
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