Satya Nadella on the magic of India stack: the yojanas and the policies and the tech stack co- evolve
India's ability to make strides in technological advancements and support them with a framework of enabling and evolving policies is "tremendous" and "unlike anything" that has ever been seen, says Satya Nadella, the India-born chairman and CEO of Microsoft. "The thing I am realising is the magic of the India stack, the yojanas and the policies and the technology stack co- evolve..that's just a virtuous cycle that's unlike anything I have seen and it is just tremendous. And I absolutely think both of these as perhaps the greatest contributions that India can make to the world," Nadella said during a conversation with Nandan Nilekani, co-founder, Infosys at the Microsoft Future Ready Technology summit in Bengaluru on Thursday.
Nadella who is on a four-day visit to India, his first since February 2020 believes that the age of celebration of technology for technology's sake is over. Technology has come to bear greater significance; the idea now rather is to democratise the use of technology, to make it accessible to commoners for their own needs. "The idea that there is a digital public good is great..but there's a digital public good which I will even call it some sort of new ways to use them..to make it possible for every economy and society to be more inclusive. It's the common man able to use the greatest technology to do something that is useful to them and it's not about tech for tech's sake..and that to me is what I think India can contribute which is I think the age of celebration of technology for technology's sake is over..it's about really thinking about technology and its use for everyone in the world," Nadella said.
The CEO met Prime Minister Narendra Modi and took to social media platform LinkedIn to commend what he calls "the government's deep focus on sustainable and inclusive economic growth led by digital transformation." Microsoft, Nadella said, will help India in realising the Digital India vision. Nadella's visit comes in less than three weeks after Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai's India tour and at a time when the country is in the midst of overhauling its digital laws. India with its vast market, large pool of talent and rich tech adoption is a key business region for global tech behemoths. Microsoft has operated in India for more than 32 years now and earlier last year announced plans to to establish its largest India data centre region in Hyderabad at an estimated cost of over Rs 15,000 crore.
During his close to an hour long address at the summit, Nadella touched upon the growing importance of technologies like cloud and AI which is evolving in terms of its sphere of usage and applicability almost every other day. "Don't bet against the cloud is the basic mantra... just go, ride the cloud economic wave," advised the CEO to a packed audience.
Expanding on the idea of digital public goods and the broader digital philosophy for India at the behest of Nadella, Nilekani said that the wider vision is to create a digital-first economy and society, leveraging the power of modern, digital technology. "The big vision is how do we create a digital-first economy and society, leveraging the power of modern, digital technology to improve the lives of people, bring economic growth, make it more equitable, inclusive, open access and really allow people to use their own data to move forward. It began with Aadhar, 80 million authentications today...NPCI built UPI which does 7-8 billion transactions a month...we have an account aggregator system which allows democratization of lending where anybody can borrow money using their own data. Then there's ONDC...there's a ton of things going on," said Nilekani.