Additionally, there are around 71 million
children, aged 5-11 years, who browse the
internet by using their parents’ devices. With
this, India has surpassed another milestone of
getting 504 million active users. With this
number, India is the second-largest country in
the world, after China, which has 805 millionplus
active internet users in present day. The
urban population has seen a drastic downfall of
about 35% in internet users, whereas the
population from tier two, tier three and the
remote villages have seen an increase of 45%
and 65% active internet users respectively. The
study also suggests that an average Internet
user spent approximately 3.5 hours on the web
browsing social media, news, mails, and OTT
digital services.
Various sectors like education, information
technology, corporates, and government
organisations have also undergone a digital
transformation during the pandemic and are
now actively adopting new and emerging
technologies to help enhance their presence
and widen customer reach. Post lockdown,
people have started spending more time
playing mobile games (such as Ludo and
PubG), engaging on social media platforms
such as Instagram, TikTok and video calling
platforms like House Party and Zoom. A global
study by Facebook suggests that India ranks
the list with 360 million active WhatsApp users.
The Opportunities that Face Us
In June 2020, some of the biggest firms from
around the globe such as Abbott and Google
announced that they will be shifting their base
from China to India. With a 1.38 billion strong
manpower, there is no dearth of talent in the
country. What does this mean for us? In order
to understand this better, I conducted a smallscale
qualitative survey to understand the
needs, skills, problems, and mindset of people
from villages in the Uttarakhand region. After
speaking with almost 40 people from diverse
fields such as military, agriculture, education,
hospitality, and retail, it comes as no surprise
that digitisation is in fact the answer to the nearfuture
for the young and old. It was heartwarming
to see an 80-year-old lady become the
talk of her village ever since someone uploaded
a video of her singing in the fields. About 16 out
of 40 people used TikTok to post content, and
almost all of them were very active on
WhatsApp.
We are at the dawn of the era where
technologies such as Augmented Reality
(AR) are rapidly growing and are used to for
entertainment and education. AR is capable of
providing users with an experience that is
interactive and enhances the real-world
experience clubbed with stimulations that can
target any human sense e.g. visual, auditory,
sense of touch, or smell. It is an immersive
technology through which the physical world is
altered and made more informative and
engaging. Popular applications like Instagram
and Snapchat have encouraged people to use
and adopt on Augmented Reality in day to day
life. Similarly, it is observed that people in the
village and rural areas are more comfortable
using Artificial Intelligence enabled voice
commands and speech recognition in their local
language to performs various tasks. Remote
learning has seen a sudden boost, and the
world today is working towards more skillsbased
development than just limiting
themselves to what is in the books. During
COVID-19, the number of people who moved
back to their native places complained about
losing their income to someone else who was
more skilled. A smartphone is not just a device
that connects people today, but it is a beacon of
the future. Corporates, in collaboration with the
government, have been working on developing
highly compatible platforms such as SAP
Leonardo. It will allow the people in India to
connect with people from around the globe and
collaborate for new opportunities.
5G can easily be classified as the nextgeneration
network that will connect more and
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