INTERVIEW | ‘We need to unleash the capitalist engine in India’: Kris Gopalakrishnan
It is going to be challenging for India to create operating systems like iOS, Android or Windows and also to create something like Facebook or Twitter, said Infosys’ co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan.
“It is going to be challenging because we need a new paradigm. We also need the marketing muscle and the investment dollars to make these into a global entity. I’m not saying that it can’t happen, it is just difficult for us to do,” Gopalakrishnan added. He was in conversation with Senior Journalist Kaveree Bamzai at the virtual ThinkEdu Conclave 2021.
Gopalakrishnan spoke about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) and what India can do to become a superpower in that sphere.
“Firstly, we need to have sufficient capacity and capability in AI and ML knowing that tech, how to use it, contributing to the development of the tech, the hardware infrastructure necessary to run the algorithms. As a nation, we are investing in it. Secondly, we generate huge amounts of data but it is not stored by Indian entities. It is collected and stored by entities outside the country. We need to figure out how this data is available to our researchers and start-ups to come up with new solutions. The government is looking at policy around data and localisation requirements,” he said.
Elaborating on a concept called a positive virtuous cycle and why India needs to create it, Gopalakrishnan explained, “Positive virtuous cycle means that we create new knowledge, innovative companies, scale them up, create wealth and then that wealth gets invested back into research. This is how Silicon Valley works, how capitalism works. We need to unleash that engine in India. We need to create a positive virtuous cycle of research, innovation, entrepreneurship and start-ups and also motivate our youth to focus on these areas.” He also stressed how the new National Education Policy (NEP) is headed towards that.
“NEP is talking about problem-solving skills, creativity, multidisciplinary studies, transferable credits. All these are important changes to create the right skills, enable research and gives flexibility to students to take up subjects that interest them,” he said.