Babus take 5G lessons, find ‘future is here’
By Manish Anand
New Delhi, October 6: On the direction of the Cabinet Secretary Rajiv Gauba, hundreds of bureaucrats visited the redeveloped Pragati Maidan during the Indian Mobile Congress 2022 and found a vast arena of 5G-enabled technology space that could be of significant interest in the near future.
“The prospects of an ambulance transforming into a hospital are highly encouraging. It was displayed at the IMC that the patient once he boards the hospital will come directly in the care of the doctors who will be able to administer and take care of the conditions even from remote locations,” said a senior official, who attended the IMC 2022.
The Cabinet Secretariat has asked the Ministry of Telecommunications to prepare a report on the participation of the bureaucrats, ranging from assistant secretary, director, deputy secretary and joint secretary, in the IMC 2022. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had launched the 5G services on Saturday.
“The 5G-enabled technology will help the transformation of the ambulance into a functional hospital, which can cut down a significant number of deaths during transportation of the patients to hospital. Roughly one-fourth of the deaths currently taking place in ambulances can be stopped with the help of the transformed ambulances,” added the official.
The bureaucrats also found a number of other futuristic solutions which could be transformative. “A box of 1X1 meter will make an office of 50 square feet go wireless, with 5G connecting all the hard wares with the high speed internet to present a smart plug in office,” said another official, who visited the IMC 2022.
However, the bureaucrats were disappointed with disconnect of the technology startups working in the field of agriculture. The claimed that such startups have no understanding of either Indian farmers or even the way farming is done.
“One startup at the IMC 2022 wants farmers to download an App that will tell on the basis of the footages relayed by the cameras installed in the farmers’ land when to give water, pesticide, fertilizer and so on. The charges for the services would be Rs 3,000 per acre. Now, such startups need to first find out the amount of profit farmers make out per acre in the country, besides the cultivators in India don’t need camera to tell them when to water their crops,” said another official who visited the IMC 2022.
The bureaucrats on other hand were much excited about the use of robotics and artificial intelligence in some of the routine works in the civic space which could be adopted by the municipal bodies in the near future.
Another area of interest for the Babus was the 5G-enabled segregation tools in logistics and e-commerce, with robots taking care of full automation of packaging, loading and transportation of the goods.
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Technology is advancing at a rapid rate especially in the last 2 decades. Wonderful to hear about the transforming ambulance…