What is currently perceived as a massive, low-tech liability could become a high-value, export-oriented economic engine, points out Ajit Balakrishnan.
When I was a student at the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, passionately interested in societal trends like all college students from that era, the biggest topic for intellectual debate was -- hold your breath -- 'Family planning as the key to India's economic development'.
Back then, this theme was as prominent in public policy debate as artificial intelligence (AI) is today.
Some Indian family planning slogans from the 1960s included 'Hum do, hamare do' ('The two of us, and our two children'), and 'Agla bachcha abhi nahin, teen ke baad kabhi nahin' ('The next child not yet, and no more after three').
We encountered these slogans on roadside hoardings, in cinemas, and in newspapers.
The Indian Post and Telegraph Department even issued two-and-a-half million copies of the commemorative postage stamp captioned 'Plan Your Family Week'.
International bodies like the United Nations, the World Bank, and even private charitable organisations like the Ford Foundation were prominent in this cause to save India.
Headlines daily reported the government's push for new methods of birth control, including intrauterine devices (IUDs) and the first domestically produced condom, Nirodh, often targeting poorer communities.
The lament then was that India had 14 per cent of the world's population ... on only 2.4 per cent of the world's land area.
I smile to myself now when I see contemporary headlines, like this one from The New York Times: 'India's most valuable export: Tens of millions of workers are driving global business opportunities', which went on to say that this is boosting the economies of many Western countries.
Even more striking is that the phrase 'population explosion' has now been replaced by international observers with 'demographic dividend'!
When I asked my deep-thinking friends about this phenomenon, one quick explanation that came from some was this: There is a current anxiety that India's extreme diversity -- 22 official languages and thousands of dialects, cultures, and consumer habits -- is often seen as a weakness because, for businesses, it's not one market but 'a thousand micro-markets', making it incredibly complex and inefficient to navigate.
Is it possible that in a future global economy dominated by AI and hyper-personalisation, this fragmentation could be viewed as an unparalleled advantage because a company that learns to sell a product in India -- navigating its diverse languages, cultural nuances, and varied price points -- is perfectly trained to succeed in any other market in the world.
This diversity is a massive training ground for AI models.
An AI that can master translation, customer service, and marketing across India's 'composite culture' will be one of the most robust and sophisticated in the world!
Then there is another current anxiety among foreign observers and India's elite -- the anxiety of a 'backward' craft-based economy holding back progress.
India's huge, fragmented, and largely informal craft sector (employing tens of millions) is often seen as a sign of economic inefficiency.
It's viewed as a failure to industrialise and automate, trapping people in low-productivity jobs.
In a future where AI and robotics can mass-produce 'perfect' goods for almost no cost, can authenticity, provenance, and human skill become the new luxuries? India, by preserving this vast, unbroken craft tradition, may find itself being the owner of the world's largest and most diverse reserve of unique human skill.
The core of this idea is what we can call the 'automation paradox': In a world where AI can design a 'perfect' chair and a robot can manufacture it 1,000 times a minute, the value of that 'perfect' chair plummets because all chairs start looking the same.
In this new world that we are sliding into, the rarest and most valuable commodity may no longer be efficiency; it may be 'humanness', or the touch of a skilled hand and the cultural narrative behind an object.
The value of a product will be less about what it does (utility) and more about how it came to be (provenance).
Consumers will pay a premium not for a product but for a story and a connection to a real person and place.
We already see this in luxury markets (Swiss watches and Hermes bags being the most obvious examples), but automation may make this a mainstream desire.
Many countries have craft traditions (like Italy or Japan), but India's advantage is the breadth of living craft traditions at this scale.
We are not talking about one village of potters, but millions of artisans across thousands of communities, each with a unique cultural signature in weaving, metalwork, carving, embroidery, and more.
These are not new hobbies. A hand-woven textile from Nagaland or a pashmina from Kashmir is not just a product: It's a piece of a continuous, ancient cultural story.
This authenticity cannot be faked or generated by AI.
Digital platforms (like ecommerce and social media) are already solving the historic distribution problem.
In the future, a craftsperson in a village in Rajasthan will be able to sell a unique, high-value item directly to a buyer in New York or Tokyo who values its specific, verifiable origin.
What is currently perceived as a massive, low-tech liability could become a high-value, export-oriented economic engine.
India's future 'Made in India' tag may shift from meaning 'low-cost manufacturing' to signifying 'high-value, authentic, human craft'.
Ajit Balakrishnan is devoting his life to unravel the connection between society and technology.
Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff
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