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From a predominantly agrarian economy to a global hub of technology and innovation, hardly any other country has seen such drastic changes as India since 1947. It is fundamentally due to the development and progress of the tech industry within India, which in more or less sure terms has fostered economic growth, enhanced competitiveness globally, and the list is endless. Over the years, the country has built a very potent technological ecosystem that covers many sectors like information technology, space, telecommunications, and digital finance. Currently, it hosts some of the largest IT companies in the world. In this article, we will delve deeper into the top 10 achievements of India since 1947.
The Indian Institutes of Technology, established in 1951, happened to be a landmark in the scenario of technical education. It pushed India as an emergent power in the way of producing world-class engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs who kept making contributions to the advancement of technology all over the world. IITs became synonymous with world-class education in the field of engineering and contributed significantly to the placing of India as a tech powerhouse. IIT-Madras introduced a health-tech accelerator recently showcasing the Indian tech achievement.
The real space race in which India participated was that which gave birth to the Indian Space Research Organization in 1969. Its many firsts include launching several satellites, indigenously developing launch vehicles, and executing several land-mark missions, Chandrayaan and Mangalyaan. The Mars Orbiter Mission in 2014 proved India's space technology capability when it became the first Asian country to reach Mars. ISRO’s 2024 missions promise a year of space exploration expanding India’s tech advancement in space further.
If there was any decade when the IT industry in India boomed in a magnanimous way, that would have to be the 1980s and 1990s. It saw the rise of such big global IT giants as TCS, Infosys, Wipro, and many more in the field of software solutions, IT services, and outsourcing opportunities. The IT sector blew a new wind of change into the economy of India and brought that country onto the global technology map.
The Green Revolution in the 1960s and early in the 1970s turned out to be the turning point in Indian agriculture. The cultivation of high-yielding variety seeds, and designing modern irrigation techniques, coupled with chemical fertilizers, made the country self-sufficient in food. Technology in agriculture plays a major role in reversing the status of India from a non-food surplus to a stipulated food surplus. Startups have impacted Indian agriculture and rural growth massively, bringing a new era of technological advancement to the nation.
Far back in 1948, India started its journey in the nuclear technology arena with the establishment of the Atomic Energy Commission. Advances in nuclear technology helped India break through to one of the most important frontlines in science and technology through its first nuclear test in 1974, which has been codenamed "Smiling Buddha." The folding of nuclear technology handsomely reinstates India in a better place toward harnessing nuclear energy to blossom into an electric power-generating state, among a host of other benefits, besides maintaining its robust defense capability.
The real telecommunication revolution took place in the 1990s when the Indian telecom sector was liberalized. The revolution of mobile telephony with cheap data plans opened up, and the communication revolution quickly spread its wings in the country. Companies like Reliance Jio played such a big role in making access to the internet through mobile devices more accessible to millions of people, hence their fast picking up of digital services and the country's digital economy.
The Digital India initiative was kickstarted in the year 2015 to carry forward India's journey into a digitally empowered economy and a knowledge economy. The thrust areas have been on digital infrastructure as tools for communication, digital literacy, and online delivery of services. The pace is getting quicker with initiatives such as Aadhaar, BharatNet, and Unified Payment Interface that are driving India into becoming a digitally empowered economy. UIDAI warned of E-mail, and WhatsApp fraud using Aadhaar in a recent news, so, the Indian tech industry has developed, but there remain loopholes that need to be taken care of.
India has done a lot of fantastically credible work in indigenous defense technology. The stimulus provided by DRDO is to be in the front with the advanced technological defense systems related to missiles, fighter jets, and naval vessels. It has added immense capabilities to its defense and hence reduced dependencies on foreign advanced technologies, with the steam shown on the Agni missile series and Tejas fighter aircraft.
The rapid digitization of payment systems, more than anything else, has of late powered most of the fintech revolution happening in India. Launched back in 2016, in a sense, UPI had changed the whole way of transactions, thereby making money transfers easy, seamless, and instant for any Indian. This has also been witnessed by the rise of fintech companies like Paytm and PhonePe, among others, which have taken it a step further in terms of gaining financial inclusion and, in turn, opening up banking and financial services to millions of Indians.
The Indian startup ecosystem has seen exponential growth in the last two decades, and this has put the country among the largest globally. All major cities: Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Pune, have all popped up on India's startup map. Indian startups have credited substantially to technology, health, commerce, and a lot more. Flipkart, Ola, and Byju are just some of the "unicorns" that have put India on the world startup map.
The Indian tech industry has taken the most glorious steps from the preamble in 1947 until now and has at last realized the potential of making the nation a world leader in technology. India's technological accomplishments, from pioneering educational institutions like IITs to Digital India and UPI, have depicted achievements in the Indian tech industry. As much as a country innovates and adopts technologies, so will its role in the global tech stage.
It was software development, IT services, and outsourcing that propelled the Indian IT industry since the 1980s and 1990s when a well-trained workforce was available at low procurement cost, combined with a business-friendly environment, and other advantages took over the industry at a fast pace. Companies like TCS Infosys, and Wipro became flag bearers of the globe, rendering international service. Thus, the Indian Information Technology Industry has had a very significant share in placing the country on the global technological map.
It was from 1969 onwards that the role of ISRO came alive with a vibrant move in the development of India's space technology. The many milestones that it has crossed, including that of satellite launching and its indigenously developed launching platforms, then the successful developments like Chandrayaan and Mangalyaan, have not only proved the might of the nation in the field of space technology but also have contributed a lot to world space sciences.
The Green Revolution has brought in a new scenario of agriculture in India with high-yielding varieties of technological inputs vis-a-vis modern irrigation methods and chemical fertilizers. All these technological inputs put together have largely helped this country almost attain self-reliance on food products and at the same time reduce the dependency of the country upon others for food imports. The Green Revolution in this country quickly improved food security and the lives of millions of farmers.
Digital India was an ambitious project initiated in 2015 that aimed to fulfill the dream of making India a digitally empowered society and a knowledge economy. Digital India is built on three areas: the first relates to building digital infrastructure, the second to providing governance and services over the Internet, and the third to encouraging digital literacy by making government departments digitalized. Three such monumental programs, namely Aadhar, BharatNet, and UPI, acting as catalysts, were seen in the penetration and proliferation of digital technologies across the length and breadth of the country to drive financial inclusion, foster the participation of citizens in economic activities, and enhance productivity.
Ideas in a country like India, with a start-up ecosystem like this, have grown by leaps and bounds over the past couple of decades, making it big in the world. Some major start-up hubs in the country include cities like Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Pune. It's not surprising that startups in the country are revolutionizing the technological, healthcare, and e-commerce scenes in the country. It is, in fact, the first creation of unicorns like Flipkart, Ola, and Byju that underscored this nascent potential of India as the global innovation hub.
