 Welcome to this conversation about the opportunities and the challenges thrown up by new technologies both around the world and of course here in India. We've got a fantastic and I should say eminent panel with us to walk us through this fourth industrial revolution as it's come to be known. Let me quickly start by introducing everyone before I get to the topic. To my right, you've got the Minister for Railways for India, Suresh Prabhu. I'm hoping to talk to him a bit about how the government is factoring in new technologies, what challenges it sees and what opportunities it sees in his department especially railways. John Rice to my left is from GE which has a long and deepening relationship with India, especially in the railway sector. We'll talk a little bit about that, how that's going, how new technologies are being factored into the new manufacturing units they're setting up in states like Bihar. To the left of John, we've got Pranay from Ola Caps who's going to talk to us about the new technology platforms that are coming into the country, the opportunities they present and the challenges they face as they try and enter new industries and new sectors in India. And then we've got Landon Downs who's going to talk to us about one of the most cutting edge new technologies that I'm not sure I fully understand so I'm hoping he'll explain to us quantum computing. He's from one QB technologies in Canada and he's going to tell us about what it is, what it can do for us and what it can do here in India. So let's just start by talking a little bit about what this is, what the fourth industrial revolution is. I'm going to quote something that Klaus Schwab wrote introducing the subject in his book, which I think all of you have. He says, referring to diverse technologies like AI, robotics and quantum computing, he said something that I think perfectly frames the conversation for us this morning. He says, of the many diverse and fascinating challenges we face today, the most intense and important is how to understand and shape the new technology revolution, which entails nothing less than a transformation of humankind. We are at the beginning of a revolution that is fundamentally changing the way we live, work and relate to one another. In its scale, scope and complexity what I consider, what he considers to be the fourth industrial revolution is unlike anything humankind has experienced before. So I think that sets us up pretty well for a conversation and now we're going to have a little video I think to illuminate the subject a little bit more and then we'll get to our conversation. The original industrial revolution was driven by the discovery that you could use steam engines to do all kinds of interesting things. That was followed by additional revolutions for electricity and computers and communications technology. We're now in the early stages of the fourth industrial revolution, which is bringing together digital, physical and biological systems. One of the features of this fourth industrial revolution is that it doesn't change what we are doing, but it changes us. We need a different economic model that will allow us to meet the basic needs of every human on the planet and that will be focused not on growth per se, but on maximising human well-being. We have energy technologies that can power our civilization, but how do we get it and implement it at the scale we need at a price that people around the world can afford? If we are able to do something to transform cities to make it more efficient, then the impact can be huge. We can use asset tracking, we can use IT, we can use 3D printing to decouple growth from the resource constraints we have. The question of adding quality to quantity, it's really about the diverse, safe, healthy and just world with clean air, clean water, clean energy. Together we are fighting to preserve our fragile climate from irreversible damage and devastation of unthinkable proportions. The prediction of 5 million jobs lost by 2020 to technology is serious, but the main question is how will we define work? How will we share the wealth? How can you have a doctor that really knows a lot about data? How can you have a biologist that knows about medicine? We have to create a space that enables people to think freely, to think divergent thoughts, to think creative thoughts. We really need new education or new training. We're working with a world in motion in First Robotics trying to encourage students from third grade all the way up through the end of high school to pursue science, math and different technologies. It's this ability of digital technology to change outcomes, to truly empower people that can create a more equitable growth. Fourth Industrial Revolution has the potential to make inequalities visible and to make them less acceptable in the future. I was the first person in the world to be able to voluntarily move my legs while stepping in a robot. The cure will be possible if enough of the right people have the will to make it happen. We're seeing this incredibly exciting convergence of genome editing, DNA sequencing. Governments have a very important role to play in enabling the safe and effective use of technology. We need to take responsibility at every level of society to adapt to these technological challenges which are redefining what it means to be completely embedded in this world. Even though we have everyday problems, we have to solve, we have to find a way to lay the foundations for the innovations of tomorrow. Great, so broad topic. Let's start with you Minister. Of all the new technologies that are coming in, as you frame rail policy for the years ahead, railways are so important both for the transport of people and goods in India, what are the things that are most exciting? What new technologies are most animating policy making in your sector? As you think about it in the years ahead. Let me first of all preface my remark by saying that this is not something we are talking about a fourth industrial revolution. Obviously there have been three before we have presumed. But they were even far more before, not necessarily in the industrial sector. But ever since human being is born, we have used technologies as a tool to better his life. So he has been doing many things, even including stone age, there was a technology. So it's not that industrial revolution is the beginning of technology. So technology has always been there. We may not have called it by that name. And this may not have resulted into industrialization, but the human beings are always used tools to better the life, to find out better avenues for growth and that's how it has been there. The challenge is obviously the first few industrial revolution that we have seen is its adverse consequences on something which we never imagine will really happen, particularly on the environment. We never realize what will be the consequence of that. The second aspect of testing a technology, how far it is relevant and what we should be doing, is its impact on society because that again something which we try to overlook and therefore something which is not sustainable, not only in terms of the sustainability which we normally attribute only to environment, it is also something which society is willing to accept and actually better the life and does not really create any issues. And we have seen that in many cases, even on environment space alone, if we talk about we were trying to address the challenge of, we wanted to get rid of ozone layer depletion, ODS. And therefore we created the gas which caused greenhouse gas emission. And therefore now we had to find out solution to other issues. So we created a, we solved a problem, created another problem. So in that context, what we really need is of technology, no doubt about it. We cannot, no one can stop it. This is something which is inevitably going to happen because that also is an invention happens in the human mind first. So human beings wanted it are going to happen. Only thing is that we must have as a border space to find out its, these two fundamentally issues, environment and society, how they will be compatible. Now in Indian context, we are always open for new technologies and therefore in fact that's how India was the largest economy of the world some centuries ago. And that's because we embraced new ideas, new technologies. Ideas is a technology also. So we need to do that and we'll continue to do that. Now just talking about contemporary issues of, I think I should not be saying something when John is here because he is the technologist, I am not a technologist. So I think using transportation is going to be the major, in my opinion, the next big thing that's going to happen is in a transportation sector. People would like to move from one place to another. We just had a meeting in Delhi on 2nd of September. We got six top global companies to come and talk about transportation technologies which we'll use in India. Develop in India, co-develop, then manufacture in India and then of course use in India and then maybe use outside the country. But that is something which I think is going to be revolutionising the entire steam. For example Hyperloop. We cannot even imagine what is going to happen as we say the brick and mortar. So talking about my own sector, tracks and rolling stock will become irrelevant. And that's how it's going to happen. So it's just imagination which is the only limit for technology development. Human minds can reach there, obviously it reaches there first. Obviously that's the technology that's going to happen. So my imagination is limited, that's why my technology development is limited. If I open up my mind and open it to many ideas, the technology development has infinite possibilities. So that's what we are willing to do it. And one area in which prime minister of a country is fully gearing up everybody is to face the new opportunities coming out of digital opportunities. So I think all technologies somehow or the other will have something to do with digital part of that. So therefore digitalisation of this whole thing is something. So we have a big campaign, Digital India. If a guy as a minister of railways tried to use digital ideas to reach out to the people. 6 billion people who travel by train every year, they make complaints while they are still travelling and we try to address those complaints while they are still on travel. So that's something which we try to do. So I think there are many opportunities. Challenges as I said, but challenges have to be overlooked or rather been to addressed only by developing better technology. So I'm not saying no technologies are solution to challenges. The solution is how to make better technologies keeping in mind these two broad aspects of environment and society. So John, then in that case, if I turn to you, you're building a thousand locomotives over the next 10 years for India. You're going to set up a manufacturing unit. And as you were telling me earlier, it's going to hopefully be a whole ecosystem around that setup. What new technologies are going to feature there? Can you give us some examples as you develop this new generation of rolling stock? Well, we've put a couple hundred million dollars into a facility in Pune, which demonstrates a version of what we will do in Bihar when we produce locomotives. It's fully digital, so you won't find a piece of paper. We're converging design and manufacturing engineering because that's going to reduce the cycle time and the ability to bring better designs that are more manufacturable right to the shop floor. And this point you make about the ecosystem, and the minister knows this very well, there tends to be a focus on the amount of money you're going to spend and the number of people you're going to hire initially. But what's really important, that's not unimportant. What's really important is this ecosystem that you build around training and skills development, suppliers, working capital for suppliers, you have to have all of that. If this facility is going to produce 100 locomotives a year that he wants to buy and export, because that is the standard. When we're exporting from this facility, we will know that we've achieved a global standard and that has to be our goal. But if you don't do the ecosystem, which never really gets focused on in the beginning, then we'll squeeze 100 locomotives out a year. Our customer may be satisfied, but the potential of the facility won't be realized. So we can't be happy with that. If I could turn to you, Prané. So we're talking about building an ecosystem with railways, but we're also one of the things, as I mentioned earlier, building new platforms, whole new systems on which new technologies can function. You run a platform effectively in a new sector, cabs. What are the challenges you face in introducing a new platform in what's an age-old industry, people hailing transport to get from A to B? How does that work and what are the challenges you face? What are the barriers that you have to cross to make that work efficiently? And what barriers do you face still? So I think to start off, the value of platform is something that we all agree on. I'll just recap that. Like we saw in the video as well, it's more about changing who you are than changing what you do. And it's a behavior change that is driven by a platform more often than not. And the way you consume data, the way you consume information, products and services, and the way you create those are something which transform and enable a lot more people and move away from a restricted environment where you need a lot of ecosystem support to kind of run through it. On coming specifically to the transportation platform that we have, I think it's a phenomenal example of what technology can do to revolutionize the existing intracity commute and now intracity commute that's available. It's basically utilizing the same asset and inventory which was idle and connecting the two in terms of improving the utilization, making it more convenience for the user and bringing a lot of control and a sense of control, keeping a feedback mechanism in loop. So some of the key challenges like you asked that we face is, or we have faced in the past, number one is to get a critical mass in order to realize the true potential of the platform. It's really essential to scale it up fast and then once you reach to a threshold scale which is relevant in our cases, the number of consumers and the number of drivers or the cabs in a city, then it kind of multiplies organically with very less effort and that is where the community starts contributing to the platform both by consuming it and expanding it. So just a case in point is about five years back getting a cab on the tap of your button was not imagined. About two years back getting a cab in 15 minutes was a wow and today if you see a cab which is 10 minutes away you say, oh it's still 10 minutes away. So that's the kind of behavior change that it drives and so that's one challenge that I see. The second challenge is the way the industry is evolving, it's fairly new it's kind of evolving pretty fast and it's essential that all the players in the ecosystem kind of understand and consume it the way it is and with the right set of governance from all stakeholders it's important to build a platform which co-outs and leverages technology to whatever is available offline in the same space. So I think that's something that we are on it and we're trying to get into the autos and the Kali Peelys are already on the platform. The next phase that we see where we see some bit of a challenge is how do we solve the problem of multimodal kind of a transportation system where you kind of connect from point A to point B which is not just in city to anywhere within India. So these are the key challenges that we have seen in the past and the key opportunities I would say that we have in front of us. So these are technologies that are sectors where new technologies are being implemented using digitisation and so on. What about quantum computing? Can you begin by explaining to us quickly what it is and what can it do for a country like India? Sure, so back in the early 1980s Richard Feynman envisioned quantum computers and what's entailed was taking the bits in classical computers and replacing them with quantum bits known as qubits. And qubits are really just bits that purposefully take advantage of quantum mechanics. If you fast forward to today we've seen many different paradigms of quantum computing actually appear with groups like Microsoft, Google, IBM and D-Wave all bringing their own unique flavour to the table. But what's exciting for practitioners is quantum computers are good at solving particular classes of problems that classical computers struggle with and today's current quantum computers are good at solving optimisation and sampling problems. Examples of these can be seen throughout industry and throughout society and often they're some of the most difficult problems but they're dressed up in disguise and they're really at their core optimisation problems. So for example if you look at life sciences and pharmaceuticals an area where India is one of the largest players by volume we see examples like development of biologics, genetic analysis, protein folding and things of that nature all having optimisation at their core. And if we shift gears to manufacturing which is something we're talking about right now we see problems like job shop scheduling, network analysis and dynamic allocation of assets again another critical industry to India. And if you want to shift gears and think a little bit about the finance sector, another major global economy we see things like portfolio construction, asset allocation and tax strategies all as examples of optimisation problems. However what people are most excited about for quantum computers and where they show real promise is in machine learning because again at its core machine learning really is an optimisation and a sampling problem. Harment Nevin who's one of the directors at Google's quantum artificial intelligence lab actually predicts that within one decade we'll only be doing quantum machine learning and this is a really really important point because already today we've seen vast application of machine learning and we've really just scratched the surface of what's going to be possible in the future. Critical examples of this already include things like self-driving cars, industrial robots, 3D printing, cancer diagnosis, drug development and many other applications in healthcare. And I think these are particularly pertinent to India's economy and country because you have very substantial complex problems like how do I deliver healthcare to 1.3 billion people and how do I digitise my manufacturing sector and stay competitive. And what we've seen in the past is as new computational capabilities come online they really rise to tide on what's possible for all other areas of technological development. So as we go through the fourth industrial revolution it's going to be important to keep your eye on these new paradigms and things like quantum computing. So minister as these new technologies arrive, John's building an ecosystem, we're talking about a platform. Is there a risk do you think that technology sometimes runs ahead of regulation and policy? You've got these things emerging and you have to quickly catch up. How big a challenge is that for a policymaker like you? You know in fact the role of government in technology is very limited. Of course important but yeah very limited. It is limited to the extent of enabling people to come out with their own ideas. Allow an ecosystem to be created because you know you can't have everything in place at the same time and they must be able to connect with each other properly. So that's why we need a proper policy support for that. We are really gearing up for that. You must have noticed in the last few years many startups which have come up in India and it doesn't happen that you cannot decide from 10th of October we are going to launch an ecosystem which is in place. It doesn't happen like that, it evolves and therefore it develops and this how it should happen. Otherwise every country would have created a silicon valley. If this was the case they would just create something. It is not a Disneyland so that you can take it from one place to another and start doing that. So therefore we must allow that to happen and that's the progression which takes place. And I think we are really on the right track to make that happen. And there are many other things which are also necessary. Of course the capital is very important and the right kind of capital. It should be angel capital, risk capital which really is necessary for it to come in at the right time again. Because probably the risk capital will come only when the risk is over. That's not risk capital. So I think something that should happen at the right time. So that is an issue additional issue. So that again needs to be addressed. There are maybe some taxation issues which again we are taking care of. So what we really mean by policy is not just one single policy. There are several things must fall in place and that's what we are trying to do. And it's an evolution which will happen. And I can see something, Pam Nisda himself is leading this. We had a fantastic program, startup program in Delhi. 100,000 of youngsters who came. And now we can see that getting into the academics and education institutions. We launched one of a satellite recently. One of that was launched by the students. Something which is unheard of before. So this is a process which takes place. You need to initiate it, provide a policy support and also keep correcting. There is nothing like one single policy which is going to work. You have to keep trying and testing and then keep being. So we have to be dynamic in terms of and also proactive in terms of finding out what really goes on. So that's what we are really trying to do. So the minister has given us a broad overview. If I could push you for a specific, you talked about building an ecosystem and the test will be exports. Is there A policies or set of policies that you think will help spur that? Well, I think the one area where government really can help is balancing the need for access if you think about big data. With the sometimes competing needs for privacy and security. And I can't speak to the situation in India, but in many countries, there are, there's laws and regulation that is attempting to restrict the ability of companies like ours to move data around so that you can take full advantage of the 30,000 jet engines that we monitor in flight every day with this idea that the government of Indonesia doesn't want the data to leave Indonesia. And so over time, there could be limitations to the value of the big data if you're working with increasingly smaller subsets. But I also want to get back to a point that was discussed in the first round. This idea that what is happening with the data, we've been monitoring locomotives and jet engines and gas turbines in service for 20 years. In the beginning, it was so expensive to move that data around and do something with it, it had limited utility today because of computing power and bandwidth, we can do a lot with it. In computing, the next step for us is going to be the development of a digital twin. So every locomotive that we produce, we will have a digital copy from birth, will track every service, every performance incident, everything that happens to that locomotive. So our ability to be very prescriptive, it's the industrial equivalent to personalized healthcare. You're going to know exactly what's happened to a jet engine, a gas turbine, a locomotive and be that much better at predicting and optimizing performance. And we're right around the corner for that. So we've gone in 20 years from monitoring our first locomotive to being able to capture and digitize an exact copy of every locomotive. Before I go to Prané, could I ask you, as these technologies come in, so they're going to monitor the locomotives, it's going to affect the jobs of people engaged in doing that today, somebody does it today and our machine will do it and someone will step in later in the chain. So doesn't that create a challenge for you with the new technologies because you have to ensure prosperity as you bring in new technologies in your various sector? How do you approach that? This is what I meant when I was mentioning earlier about the societal issues. So that's what I was really saying is, you know, we can, of course, we have seen something very interesting when the railways came into UK for the first time. The cart, those who were running horse carts were feeling that they will do jobs. But then they got jobs, they lost jobs, but they got somewhere else. But what you're saying, that happened during the first industrial revolution. But what you're saying, particularly in the last decade or so, and particularly all over the world, is something like new economic growth is not adding jobs. And that's something which is of a serious concern to everybody. And not just locomotives, which we can tackle in terms of displacement of jobs. But what is really happening is the robots which are going to come in a big way. And that is going to really create a huge challenge. Of course, people are saying that we always find a solution to a problem when the problem comes in. I think that's the one way to look at it is don't trouble, trouble until trouble troubles you. But you can see the trouble coming. Always a good idea. So I think we'd rather also look into that aspect of it and look at it. So I think this is a big issue. Like a big data what John says for me is a big, problem is a big job. And therefore, we really need to find out how do you actually create those new jobs. Which are those new sectors which are going to create. We are working for that in Indian context with skilling programs. We are trying to create more, impart more skills to people so they become more self-employed. They can do both jobs. But at the same time at a global level, I think any case, you can create jobs in a particular geography for a particular space of time. But if technology comes in and then it can displace those jobs as well. So in global context, we really need to find out how are we going to find jobs for the 7 billion people. That's something which we really need to understand. This is a macro, not just macro in the context of a geography. But this is something which we really need to understand from where are they going to come. Because if each Japan develops robots because they have their problem because of the age profile of the population. But they develop technology to take care of that. Can you keep that technology only in the Japanese borders? That's going to spill over to other countries and therefore it's going to create. So therefore it is no argument for not developing new technology. But this is something which we really need to mainstream into looking at policy support that is necessary for development of new technologies. And it's pin-off benefit on social issue. That's what I mean. What about your platforms? Your platform helps create a new kind of job for people who were engaged in the job earlier. But it's a different kind of job, right? And what was the challenge in attracting people to that? So I think what has happened is more convenience has increased the overall entropy of the system if I talk at a macro level. And the need to commute is more of utilitarian now as against a luxury or an opportunity. Be it a cab or a auto or whatever. What this brings in is an opportunity to create a lot of employment in the form of creating entrepreneurs. And so we have half a million drivers today, more than half a million drivers. And even today the demand is your humongous income as comparison in comparison to the supplier that we have that we can easily add equally more number of drivers. So that gives us a tremendous opportunity to kind of go out in the market and partner with the relevant stakeholders, partner with the skilled development council and create more jobs and we are onto it. And that's something which is a different kind of a job where it's not just a worker kind of a relationship but it's a partner relationship where you make him an entrepreneur, make him buy his car or lease out a car and create a livelihood for himself. How can big data help with managing these transitions between the kinds of jobs we've got across industries? As people come into new kinds of jobs so we're going from say if someone's a full-time driver employed with a car company somewhere at a hotel or something there might be benefits attached. Now he's switching into a more entrepreneurial role. How can big data help manage that transition for both the employer and the employee in a place like India especially? So thinking of it in context of quantum computing some of the problems we face that are big data problems also could be big search problems and quantum computers are very good at dealing with those types of problems. And what I think we're going to see is as quantum computers mature there's going to be a huge surge for jobs and people who can program those types of systems. And today because it's a relatively new field there's actually very few people in the world with that skill set. I think this presents a tremendous opportunity for India as a country because it has a very large IT savvy workforce and a very young population. And by engaging early in education around things like big data, machine learning, quantum computing they really could take a leadership role and leapfrog some of the other places in the world. So I think from a big data perspective if you look at what's coming out of John's engines and out of the different user apps and things like that we're going to find solutions that we couldn't have imagined. And in terms of education you can already access all of these things online very easily if you want to learn about it. There's software development kits, there's simulators, there's educational documentation, all in common programming language people understand like Python and C++. And in the context of quantum computing you're actually going to see it accessible via the cloud as a utility in a very similar way to what you would see already with classical systems. Think of something akin to say an AWS. And when you take these things combined you'll see that for very little upfront cost Indian entrepreneurs can start delivering machine learning and quantum services today. And if you take that up one more level it's actually not difficult for major multinational corporations and Indian corporations to start understanding where you can apply these technologies and working with these Indian entrepreneurs. So if you step back and you think about it you've got a very large workforce who are IT savvy. You have a new crop of entrepreneurs. You have a corporate environment where people are learning how to apply these problems. And then if you have support through government policy for education India really could take a lead in this area. And if you think about who's actually been successful in this area to date it's still very very limited. And if you look at the countries pursuing this right now you'll see Canada, the US, the UK, the European Union starting to invest heavily in building out their countries capabilities for quantum computing. However there's no reason my India's name shouldn't be on that list. And in fact IT services is already one of India's largest exports and with its rapidly growing workforce it really should be one of the leaders in the space. So London talks about the development of skills. As you build your ecosystem how big a challenge for you is it as you bring in your technologies finding skilled people in the Indian context specifically? Well I mean globally it's a challenge. We spend a billion dollars on training globally. It's both a challenge and an opportunity because we see the world as our oyster. We operate in 180 countries. We do manufacturing and service and you know we've got employees located in all of them. And so we like to think that we're kind of a global conduit and we're 18,000 people in India, 6,000 engineers working on stuff that helps us all over the world. So India is a perfect place for us and half of what we build here gets exported so we prove that we can compete from an Indian base. But I want to talk about something that I think the fourth industrial revolution misses a little bit and that is the importance of dealing with the dislocation. Every industrial revolution however many we've had over time brings with it dislocation. It has to. I mean you look at what car services are doing. I mean my kids graduated from high school in the United States. The first thing they wanted to do is buy a car. Now they live in Chicago and Baltimore and Uber is their car, right? So the market is changing. General Motors and Ford can resist that or they can embrace it and try to figure out how to create a different form of utility. So the question for countries and companies, because we're part of it too, is how do you recognize the dislocation? Is it reskilling, repurposing, retraining, different forms of capacity building because that's what you're going to need and you can't have your head in the sand because it will happen. We've got visual technology now that you can use to inspect tracks. So typically around the world tracks, railroad tracks are inspected manually. People go along but over time you end up with problems. The sun, the heat, they buckle and you can have a derailment. That's going to be done digitally. You're going to have cameras on the front of trains. They're going to know within a millimeter whether the track is out of sequence. There will be no need for manual inspections. That's not a bad thing. That's a good thing, right? Those people who are doing that now can be repurposed, can be retrained. You don't want to avoid that technical development. You just need to recognize that with it comes the need to move people around and get them prepared to do something else. Do you think there's a recognition of that among policy makers? Not enough. The eternal vigilance of how technology is changing these things? Not enough and I think companies and countries can do more. I think we have a role to play as we reallocate and restructure and every company does this. We need to help repurpose and retrain people who are affected by that. Do you think there's enough of a recognition of the fact that new technologies as much as they help a lot of people in many ways? They also change things in all kinds of ways, affect jobs, affect livelihoods, affect the way we think about work. Do you think there's a recognition of that, both among companies and policy makers, just posing the same question to you? I think that there's this reasonable appreciation and acknowledgement of the new technology, the value that it brings in, and the evolution that it's going through and the kind of government, our regulation or the framework which is required to enable this further and create more jobs and create more value in the complete ecosystem. I think there's a fair recognition and talking about us specifically. I think both at the centre and the state level, the governments are figuring out what could be the right framework and I think there's something that's going to be coming out very soon. Minister, you talked a little bit about this earlier, but the first industrial revolution, you talked about how horse carts define new jobs. In India though, isn't there a difference in that you just have so many more people? You have many, many more people, many of them are very, very young and the pressures they pose are quite unique, are they not? How does that affect the policy making framework when we talk about policy makers having to recognise these changes that are taking place? That's why I'm saying we are probably uniquely placed in terms of addressing this challenge, which is really a big one for the whole world, but particularly for the country. And therefore of course I personally feel that we should not have population growing indefinitely, believing that it's going to give us a demographic dividend because a demographic dividend will come for a particular time. So I think particularly now what we really need to do is to create new opportunities for them, that's why this big programme of scaling, but one more thing which has happened during the last few years and that is something which was development of global supply chains, which is something which is a very interesting development which happened during the last two, three decades. And that's how companies could outsource to Southeast Asia develop because Japan was developing, then China was developing that also helped Southeast Asia to develop. I think over a period of time I'm not so sure whether this new revolution which is inevitably going to happen, how far they will rely on these global supply chains because of so many other considerations going beyond economics because we can see now the new geopolitical challenges coming up. We probably could see a disruption into this coming out of so many challenges. If that happens, not necessarily on account of economic reason as I said for something else, it could create huge challenges for a country which were thriving because though they were not necessarily developing a new technology, but they are part of a global supply chain nonetheless they are benefiting more in terms of jobs because obviously the technology holder was benefiting from IP and the other one were benefiting from doing a little less value added jobs. So I think that's something which also has to be taken on board. So I think we are certainly gearing up for this in terms of making this young population, making, stand out their own feet, making them self-employed. My own example, we run a small NGO, we are trained almost about 100,000 people and made them self-employed and that's over the last one and a half decade. Most of them are women and they would never venture out of place because of my confidence. Which is a huge problem in India because labour participation among women is very, very low. That's another issue. It's not just finding employment to young people, but finding out on the gender issues, particularly for the women. And therefore uniquely placed jobs are to be created for women because not necessarily because they are women but because in society, in rural areas, they have to also take care of certain other household issues. So they have to run a family. So they cannot work as the others can work going out for a long period of time. So we must be able to find jobs nearer to their home, something which they can do while they also take care of their household responsibilities. Something like this is also going to be a very interesting issue. So I am saying, that's what I was coming back to my old point, of societies change, they are not the same societies globally. So we cannot find a global solution to such local issues. At the same time, it is also necessary to look at these issues as a global challenge and I think World Economic Forum keeps giving advisory about how much more GDP is going to be added, etc. I think this is a good time, WF start thinking about where are going to be the new jobs coming up. What are the new opportunities coming up? How are they going to be taken and how people can take advantage of that? Something like this will be more value added. I think that could be really something more relevant too. So I think before we have the fourth industry revolution, I think we can have a new series of advisories coming from WF about the job opportunities. That's an idea. So I am going to open this up to questions for the panel. Let's start in the side of the room. Yeah, please. Hi, I just wanted to have a question. I have something to think about between Mr Rice and Minister. For all the locomotives that he's manufacturing for you, what is the task you can give a company like GE to say all the data which is to be analysed of these locomotives that he just talked about, jobs that could be created by training people in some rural locations, in other provinces, other areas, to make sure that you tie up certain quota of data analysts, jobs we created for the amount of machines that you create which work for you in this country. So the other point was, we didn't discuss about the 60-70% of the Indian population who are rural and agricultural. What does this revolution do for us to really revolutionise the agriculture, leveraging, of course, the technological advancements and disruptions which is industrial in that sense, so that India actually can have inclusive growth. And we can also get them included using technology and modernised agriculture. And the fourth, third point to first, John, and somebody like that was to say, you know, what are you doing about training the thousands of Indians to move away from the contact centre, customer support, BPO, to becoming data analysts in the future, because the human capital we have today can be leveraged for the Gs of the world for outsourcing data analysis work and creating employability for our people who are educated or who can be trained or educated for employability in the data analysis space. Thank you. So, if... So, as I understand it, so would you tie specific jobs to specific, you know, specific quotas that if you come and do this and bring these new technologies, you have these many jobs? We talked about data analysts, but just to broaden that out a little bit. This whole exercise, as I said, of skilling people is essentially aimed at that. We are creating district by district, the profile of what opportunities could be created there, and also, on the other hand, we are trying to find out particularly for that local district, local situation, how can the people be trained into that particular discipline, and that's an extremely important exercise which is already on the way. We are created first time in India under the Prime Minister, the new ministry, which is essentially doing exclusively this job. Now, in terms of agriculture, in fact, today, what is the opportunity for... what is an exit route for an farmer? You know, exit route. So therefore, if you can actually, and anywhere in the world we have seen, that this has happened, this is the particular, that is all the revolution is all about, is allowing people to migrate from the agriculture to something else. Even in China, same thing happened, and people say this was even bigger long march than the long march of Mao itself when the people migrated from villages into rural areas into factories, from farm to factories in the biggest way. So our opportunity here is, how can we... because there are anyway more number of people on agriculture than what they are... so there's a disguise employment, it is really not employment. So therefore what we are trying to do is to allow them to learn skills which will enable them to live farm and try to do something as close as possible to the place where they live, to also solve and mitigate a problem which will come out of urbanisation when people are migrating such large number to the areas like this. So this is exactly what we are trying to do. But of course as I said, it is something which again cannot just happen only on skill alone. We really need a proper industrial activity and that's what we are working on making India compare. So this fourth industrialisation hopefully will also create opportunities of the kind that are necessary befitting the local situation that prevails in a country like India. And therefore that's something which we really constantly keep upgrading ourselves to find out how that can happen. But the whole exercise is essentially aimed at allowing people to move from better opportunities because on farm there are many people working on a small holding so therefore they are not making enough money and that's why there is a problem. So if you can move about say 40% of the people from farm to new opportunities in skilling and other places, obviously to that extent the pressure on land will go down because 40% people don't have to rely on the earning from the land alone and that's what we really are trying to do. Since that was also addressed to you, how can companies help with that? You're going to go to Bihar which is mostly rural. Well, better locomotives will help food get to the market before it spoils so that's a good thing. We're not in Bihar by accident. We're in Bihar because the real ministry said this is where we want you to do this. So we can handle prescriptive requests, right? That's I think one of the benefits of working with companies that have scale and capability. So we can do that. And your third point about the digital work that we do in country, you should talk to the guy sitting in front of you. He runs Bangalore and that's where we're starting to do some of that work. So it is possible to do it in India, certainly. How rural you can get with stuff like that depends if you can find people who are qualified to do it, right? So that's the match that has to be made. Will the fourth industrial revolution, big data, will it drive out small enterprises? Will it create monopolies which are so big that they will influence how people vote like Facebook and Twitter? And can that be allowed to happen? And that's what I think so should be worrying the minister also going forward because how could these big enterprises be blackmailing the public system, the democracies of smaller countries? That's a question. Can I ask you that question? Are you going to become too big and blackmail the rest of us? So I think that is the fact that it's a platform and the real stakeholders are the consumers and the people who are actually providing services. So to that angle it's something which will be a sustainable long-term thing and beat any platform for that matter so long as it creates more jobs, it creates more value, it creates more convenience and gives more control to both the stakeholders on both the sides of the platform. I think that's not going to be a challenge. What about you Lantham, what do you think? As ever more powerful forms of technology like quantum computing arrive is there a risk that too much power is concentrated in one company in one sector that can maybe master data better than others and so on? I think a lot of the innovation is seen actually at the hands of the entrepreneur and a good example of this is a website called Cagle which runs machine learning competitions and what happens is companies, very large venerable companies post their data and say, hey can you do a better job than what we're doing and then these different data scientists compete for it and what they found is most of the competitions are one handily by these data scientists. They have no background in the industry and they get it done within a matter of a week or two and often beating teams of 20, 30, 50 people who have been at it for 10, 20 years. So I think a lot of the innovation still can rest with the individual and maybe a question is do those individuals all get gobbled up by the larger corporations as time passes but I think a lot of the stuff really, really is well distributed at least in the beginning. So it probably comes down to large companies' abilities to actually aggregate these individuals. Another question? Yeah. I'm going to move to this side in a sec after this. The things which you talked about in the fourth industrial revolution is the lot of startups. Now it's very important. You know we talk about the success stories in the startups but we forget about how many people fail and I would like to comment on this that collegeians straight from college going into business are likely not to succeed. It's unfortunate but they need experience. They need more knowledge. They need more age. They need mentoring, et cetera, et cetera. In order to avoid failures as much as possible I think these startups need a certain maturity a certain age to get into those startups because you know just now I've been hearing from the morning oh the collegeians are all gungho about startups that's not the way according to me. What does the minister and other panelists think? I'm going to get another question before and then we can address them together. I really want to ask the panel on what do they think about gender parity in the fourth industrial revolution. We've actually seen at least in India men dominate computer sciences, mathematics, engineering fields. What are some of the new opportunities for women in the fourth industrial revolution? Another from here. My question is regarding the point that was made that we won't be needing manual rail inspectors the track inspectors but my question is our school education system is actually still producing factory workers and still producing the manual rail inspectors who are going to be growing up and then we'll be needing them to be skilled. So the idea is if the school education is worked upon there's a radical change that is required in India that's at least a lot of people we work in the rural segment so I go to the schools and work with them we shouldn't be needing skilling in ten years. We are still making them we are still thinking making PDF files available online is going to make them ready for the actual active participants of the fourth industrial revolution. That's the school children. So my question to the minister is from the government perspective is the radical change in education coming because if that's not going to come we're going to miss out on all the points that we're talking about. Minister if we start with you with the gender question just bundling it up we're talking about how we keep up our skills education with where technology is going and so on it has to keep up with the changes and as you change it you also have to make sure that you ensure that women who have as I said earlier very low labour participation also low participation in the education sector that they come in in bigger numbers how do you do the two things? See this is not such a difficult thing to accomplish because this is something which we are actually trying to do. Do you have an example saying India particularly, this is exactly what is our affirmative action actually aiming at. So this is something which we are really working on these issues so this is not something which is of course people would then say oh you are doing it, where is the result? I think this is something which I wish the new industrial revolution maybe fifth will try to create result before we begin action. So I think that something will be very good but I think till such time that we have that revolution that we have to first begin action and then only we will get result. So we are working on each of these areas and therefore we will wait for the results to come in the next few years time. On my good friend Sheikah's point which is something which is right that there are many failed and only few succeed but if you really look at it I am not trying to make a value judgement but I am just looking at it just thinking myself little loudly is that's a lot of nature that doesn't survive if that was a case every animal which is born doesn't survive so this is how it is so I think and if at all everybody who are going to survive I don't know what's going to happen and that's one of the issue that we deal when we talk about biotechnology insurantly is something like this that if everything survives the proliferation of it and what it really means to ecology broadly so but point is well taken to reduce failures what is that we should try to do in terms of making sure because that's again is a precious capital precious time that we spend on it that's why point is well taken and I think that's something which will again try and learn over a period of time but a point is the start-ups are ones who are by nature are thinking something which in the absence of ecosystem may cause a failure that also possibility sometimes and you are thinking so much ahead of time that people might think oh please if you are thinking like this I could have thought about it why you can only think about it so I am challenging him not because he is thinking wrong but because I think why I could not think the same idea before him and that's what I want to bring it down so I think that's something which is inevitable but we must therefore have an open system wherein nobody will be able to put that idea down to make him fail deliberately so that others don't succeed so that's something which we realize today if the goal is to prepare people for a 35-year career that doesn't change you are going to fail you got to prepare people for lifelong learning because the job I mean who can predict what you know 2040 is going to look like and so if you don't have flexibility in terms of how people think about preparing themselves and those that work with them you will fail and I think that's we have to do that and countries have to do that and the other point I would make on diversity is it's coming I mean I mentioned briefly the facility we have in Pune over a thousand people work there 25% of the workforce is women we hire women from the local universities they start on the shop floor operations management and they set a standard for us there's no question in my mind that women in this country are going to have more and more opportunities and companies like ours are going to love to have them as a start-up that's succeeding what are you doing to address these issues I think what is essential is obviously like minister said it's only a few start-ups who probably succeed and the definition of success is something that we see as an outcome but what goes within is a tremendous learning experience whatever you do and what is essential is how do we promote and enable the application of that in whatever he or she is doing next that is one and the second part is like again something that minister said how do we create a more conducive and more enabling ecosystem to promote this spirit and this mindset change of creating something which can potentially constructively disrupt what is happening be it on the digitisation front be it on bringing in more efficiencies and what is available and just coupling this point with the question that we had on this side I think the education system is something which needs to be slightly tweaked and I'm sure it's not that easy I mean me saying that is very simple but I think there are people who are on it and I've already started seeing some of it especially in the colleges where you have now courses on start-ups entrepreneurship how do you change your mindset in terms of the attitude that you carry and not just about skilling and the capabilities that you learn in terms of doing a job so I think that's a long-term change in my personal view which is happening and it's good on its trajectory great and with that I've just been told I have to call this to an end so thank you everyone for addressing this great topic and thank you to the audience for the question