Finance Minister Arun
Jaitley announced that the DoT will set up test centre for 5th generation
telecom technology with IIT Chennai. As per budget document, the FM has
proposed to allocate Rs 134.48 crore for setting up of the "5G connectivity Test Bed". Further the minister said the government
would invest in research in new areas such as machine learning, artificial
intelligence, robotics as it looks to prepare the country for the technology of
the future. "Technologies such as
machine learning, artificial intelligence and others are the technologies of
the future and NITI Aayog will establish a national programme to conduct
research and development in these areas,". These new generation technologies are
associated with 4th Industrial revolution. Are we getting ready for
the Factories 4 ?
The term Industrial
Revolution was first popularized by the English economic historian Arnold
Toynbee to describe Britain’s economic development from 1760 to 1840. It
witnessed the emergence of mechanization, a process that replaced agriculture
with industry as the foundations of the economic structure of society. Mass
extraction of coal along with the invention of the steam engine created a new
type of energy that thrusted forward all processes thanks to the development of
railroads and the acceleration of economic, human and material exchanges. Other
major inventions such as forging and new know-how in metal shaping gradually
drew up the blueprints for the first factories and cities as we know them
today.
The first Industrial
Revolution and most technological developments preceding it had little or no
scientific base. It created a chemical industry with no chemistry, an iron
industry without metallurgy, power machinery without thermodynamics.
Engineering, medical technology, and agriculture until 1850 were pragmatic
bodies of applied knowledge in which things were known to work, but rarely was
it understood why they worked. The second Industrial Revolution accelerated the
mutual feedbacks between these two forms of knowledge `science’ and
`technology’. Historians have labeled the years from 1870-1914 as the period of
the Second Industrial Revolution. While the First Industrial Revolution caused
the growth of industries, such as coal, iron, railroads and textiles, the
Second Industrial Revolution witnessed the expansion of electricity, petroleum
and steel.
The Third Industrial
Revolution, or the Digital Revolution, refers to the advancement of technology
from analog electronic and mechanical devices to the digital technology
available today. The era started during the 1980s and is ongoing. Advancements during the Third Industrial
Revolution include the personal computer, the internet, and information and
communications technology (ICT). The first industrial revolution used water and
steam to mechanize production, the second used electric energy to create mass
production and the third used electronics and information technology to
automate production.
The Fourth Industrial
Revolution builds on the Digital Revolution, representing new ways in which
technology becomes embedded within societies and even the human body. The
Fourth Industrial Revolution is marked by emerging technology breakthroughs in
a number of fields, including robotics, artificial intelligence,
nanotechnology, quantum computing, biotechnology, The Internet of Things, 3D printing
and autonomous vehicles.
The fourth revolution is
unfolding before our eyes. For India, the Fourth Industrial Revolution brings
tremendous opportunities to leapfrog many stages of development, hastening its
journey towards becoming a developed economy. In many ways, the Fourth
Industrial Revolution is a leveller. The technologies being used in India will
be the same as those in use in the developed world. Robots, AI, IoT are all
technologies transforming industry in the West and are ready to do the same in
India.
We missed the first and
second Industrial revolutions but IT manpower gave us a strong foothold on the
global platform in digital era. Along
with lure of opportunity, there exists threat of `premature
industrialization’. De-industrialization
sets in for developed economies after they reach high level of economic
prosperity. Manufacturing as a share of
total employment peaked at 45% in the UK before World War I, while in the US,
it peaked in the range of 25-27% in the 1970s, before dropping off in both
cases. But the UK and the US were both prosperous economies at the respective
point in times at which this deindustrialization occurred. Harvard economist
Dani Rodrik sees what he called “premature deindustrialization” as
manufacturing shrinks in poor countries that never industrialized much in the
first place. Manufacturing as a share of employment peaked at about 15% for
Brazil in the late 1980s, and has been declining ever since. In India,
manufacturing peaked at 13% in 2002 and has been in decline since then. We have
a thriving service sector but need jobs in manufacturing too.
Analysis by World Economic
Forum `Readiness for Future ofProduction’ analyses strengths and weakness of India. Of the 100 countries
we are ranked 30 for structure of production but lower at 42 for drivers of
production. The focus thus has to be on improving the areas where we are week.
Our weakest area is Technology & Innovation. To understand this we need to
reflect on Intellectual Property. We will address this in next part- are there patents in 1st
Industrial Revolution?
