The World Economic Forum announced its new Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution in India, which would aim to bring together the government and business leaders to pilot emerging technology policies.
The Prime Minister delivered an address at the event to mark the launch of the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
The launch of this Centre, the fourth in the world after San Francisco, Tokyo and Beijing, opens the door to immense possibilities in the future.
The centre would be based in Maharashtra and it has selected drones, artificial intelligence and blockchain as the first three project areas.
The new centre will work in collaboration with the government on a national level to co-design new policy frameworks and protocols for emerging technology alongside leaders from business, academia, start-ups and international organizations.
NITI Aayog will coordinate the partnership on behalf of the government and the work of the centre among multiple ministries.
The WEF has also entered into partnerships with the Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh governments for the new initiative and more states would be roped in going forward.
The initial efforts at the national level are focused on two emerging technology areas — artificial intelligence and machine learning; and blockchain and distributed ledger technology.
The first project will focus on expanding access to data to accelerate the adoption of artificial intelligence in socio-economic areas like education, healthcare and agriculture. The second will focus on the application of smart contracts to boost productivity and transparency while reducing inefficiency.
At state level, the Government of Maharashtra in collaboration with the Centre is planning to undertake a drone mapping operation in the agriculture sector.
The projects will be scaled across India and globally. As part of the WEF’s global network, the new centre in India will work closely with project teams in San Francisco, Tokyo and Beijing, where such Centres are already present.
Industry 4.0 is a name given to the current trend of automation and data exchange in manufacturing technologies. It includes cyber-physical systems, the Internet of things, cloud computing and cognitive computing. Industry 4.0 is commonly referred to as the fourth industrial revolution.
Industry 4.0 fosters what has been called a “smart factory”. Within modular structured smart factories, cyber-physical systems monitor physical processes, create a virtual copy of the physical world and make decentralized decisions. Over the Internet of Things, cyber-physical systems communicate and cooperate with each other and with humans in real-time both internally and across organizational services offered and used by participants of the value chain.
The term “Industry 4.0”, sometimes shortened to 0 or simply I4, originates from a project in the high-tech strategy of the German government, which promotes the computerization of manufacturing.
WEF Founder and Executive Chairman: Klaus Schwab.
