Only Deep Tech And Digital Can Make India A Superpower By 2047

India will not become a superpower without a 10X growth in its rural income. That alone will motivate youngsters to continue to live in Rural India and transform village life.

- Ashok Jhunjhunwal

India today has made huge gains in providing decent telecom and Internet services to most Indians at affordable prices. Thirty years back, we had only seven million phones and one had to wait for up to eight years to get a mere telephone. This has all changed, with 4G telecom and Internet services available to almost all our citizens today at very affordable prices. At the same time, the per capita real income of Indian households has gone up by about seven times in the same period. This has indeed taken a large percentage of Indian households out of abject poverty. But simultaneously, the gap between the rich and the poor has been increasing, such that 85% of households continue to live with income less than ₹25,000 per month.

Rural household incomes are much less and an average farmer household earns about ₹10,000 per month. Programs like NREGA, Midday Meal Scheme and free rations since Covid, has enabled people to survive. But rural India continues to struggle with large unemployment and under-employment. This forces youngsters (especially those with minimum education) to migrate to urban India, where high-tech manufacturers employ some of them, though mostly for low-end jobs (including security, housekeeping, construction, and other manual work). As urban India is already very crowded, migrants often have to live in crime-infested slums. With increasing environmental degradation, life is tough, unhealthy and with the slightest crisis (like during the pandemic), the slum-dwellers face brutal onslaught from law-enforcement agencies.