Will India adapt to the four global shifts?

FOUR fundamental transitions that will reshape the world as we know it are concurrently playing themselves out.

The first is the transition from a Westphalian to a virtual civilisation. It has been in the works for over three decades, but is reaching an inflection point now. The internet was the most audacious experiment in anarchy — and it has succeeded beyond the wildest imagination of its conceivers, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET). It represents the largest ungoverned space on planet earth.

Never before in the history of humankind has no much power simultaneously resided on so many fingertips. There is more data that is churned out everyday today than has been from the dawn of civilisation to the turn of the third millennium.

There is a brick-and-mortar civilisation that grew over the epochs and a virtual civilisation that is evolving here and now. The future of humanity lies on the crossroads of these two civilisations.

It is ironic that all this is happening while three conflicts are simultaneously playing themselves out in three distinct geographies that seek to change the post-World War-II and the post-Cold War brick-and-mortar Westphalian order — Russia-Ukraine since February 2022, Israel-Hamas-proxies of Iran since October 2023 and China’s not-so-peaceful rise since Xi Jingping’s ascent to power in November 2012.

While people may live in a physical world with somatic needs, their workday is spent substantially in a virtual world. The world saw flashes of this transition during the Covid-19 pandemic when work-from-home became the norm.

However, in India, are we even discussing what this transition means for our society and how to be future-ready? The answer is, unfortunately, no.

The second transition is from the third to the fourth industrial revolution. The first industrial revolution was a move from an agrarian ethos to a mechanisation milieu, powered by coal in 1765. The second happened a century later in 1870 and was powered by oil, gas and electricity. The third happened another century later in 1969, with nuclear energy and electronics holding the fort. The building blocks of the fourth industrial revolution are the internet of things, artificial intelligence, genomics, proteomics biotechnology, robotics, weaponisation of connectivity, data, computational power and automation of the workplace, to name but a few.

What does this transition mean for the future of work? Why is the world focusing on the leisure economy — sports, tourism, entertainment and personal services (STEPS)? What does this mean for India, which has a humungous young population with a median age of 28.4 years? India’s demographics will start changing by 2041. Are we thinking about the future while 22.5 lakh industrial robots are currently in use around the world and 17 lakh manufacturing jobs have been lost to automation? Upwards of two crore manufacturing jobs could be lost to robots by 2030.

Automation is not a bad thing, but how will we provide sustainable occupations to millions upon millions in India who would not find themselves on the employment gradient? What is the social security architecture that we need to create for them? Would keeping 75 crore people on free rations be enough or Rs 6,000 as annual income support to farmers do the trick? How will India make the leap from a low middle income country to a high middle income country? How will it sustain and grow to a $5 trillion economy, presuming it gets there by 2027-28? Is India thinking through this central shift? The answer, unfortunately, is no.

The third transition is energy. There is a linear hawser through which the energy chain ascends hydrocarbons, intermediates and renewables. India still depends on fossil fuels as its primary source of energy. As much as 80 per cent of it comes from coal, oil, gas and solid biomass. The rest comes from intermediates and renewables. This broadly translates into 112 crore people still being dependent upon hydrocarbons for their primary source of energy.

How then is India going to make the transition to net carbon zero by 2070, something that it committed itself to at the Conference of Parties (COP26) in Glasgow in 2021? It would require: first, a rethinking of India’s fundamental economic model that has a hydrocarbon-heavy footprint; second, trillions of dollars in investment; third, a fundamental technological recalibration of its industrial enterprise base, creating a new legal and regulatory framework and, most important, altering the thinking of people. Is India even preparing for this basic changeover? The answer is no. A readaptation of this kind would be tectonic.

Nothing demonstrates it more eloquently than the resistance by people of Chandigarh to the shift to rooftop solar panels. For, no effort has been made to educate the community as to why it is vital to make this shift.

The final transition is the climate transition. The challenge of global warming is real. The world needs to restrict the warming of planet earth to 1.5 degree Centigrade or 2.7 degree Fahrenheit above the pre-industrial temperatures, as adopted in the Paris Agreement of 2015. Surprisingly, the Economic Survey of 2024 questioned this holy grail of global warming by suggesting that a warmer world would be more equitable and resilient. There is no empirical evidence to bear this out.

Adverse weather events (AWEs) have become the norm rather than the exception. In the recent flooding in the Sahara Desert, eight inches of rain per square metre fell in a very short span of time. There have been 42,000 heavy rainfall events in this world’s largest desert between 2000 and 2021. The threat to small island nations and coastal cities is all too real. Himachal Pradesh is a telling example. In one and a half months, it has seen 51 flashfloods.

Is India doing enough as a leader of the Global South to ensure that the common but differentiated responsibility commitments are implemented and the industrialised West walks the talk? The answer, again, is, unfortunately, no.

The preoccupation with the politics of identity — religion and caste — is once again making India miss the bigger picture.